the evidence that convinced me christianity was wrong

I did it. I had finally done it. After years of struggling to complete my undergraduate degree due to a lack of funding, I accomplished the task. I went through two undergraduate programs at two different seminaries, but I got it done. This was my Odyssey, something I worked on for a decade. I should have been proud. I should have been elated. Instead, I was empty.

My degree was in Christian philosophy, but I was quickly moving to a point where I wanted little to do with Christianity. Years and years of being in the system had worn me down before I ever had a chance to leave the system and enjoy any of its power. I had concluded very early on in my Christian education that most of the people at the top didn’t believe the Christian message, but that I would be different. But year after year of watching Christian leaders let me down, let friends down, let everyone down, I found myself disillusioned with Christianity. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know how I got here.

There were no arguments or a series of arguments that convinced me I was wrong. I didn’t pick up The God Delusion and become an atheist – in fact, I thought and still think it’s a shite book. The intellectual arguments were the last thing to convince me to abandon the faith entirely. The blinders of the faith had to fall off long before the intellectual arguments could do any good. They did come, but they filled the gap and provided an explanation for what I had been through; my doubts didn’t cause me to lose my faith, my faith caused me to gain doubts. Those doubts didn’t come from evolution or holes in the Bible’s story, none of those arguments seemed rational or real to me until I had failed to see any evidence of Christianity in the lived experience of the church.

The seminary classes were like the churches we attended – full of in-fighting, rivalries, and power competitions. Our sermons were constantly on why we should respect the authority of the pastor, why we should lead holy lives, why homosexuality is evil, why we should stop abortion, and the list went on. Thinking back, I can’t think of any sermons – or at least many sermons – about our treatment of the poor.

The poor. The immigrant. The downtrodden. This became my big sticking point. Late in my teenage years all the way up into my late 20s I couldn’t figure out why the church wasn’t doing more to help people. Why would Christians speak out against immigrants? They’re just trying to make a better life for themselves. Isn’t that who Jesus told us to reach out to? Why were we giving preference to wealthier members? From an early age I saw how churches would give preference to the wealthier members of the congregation.

I remember when a wealthy member of my city was running for mayor, so he joined our church, one of the biggest in the city and certainly the one with the most presence thanks to the controversial pastor. He donated heavily to the church and every single Sunday he was at church on the front pew, the entire campaign season. I can’t recall if he got baptized or not (I vaguely remember it), though I do remember a few discussions about it. The pastor gave up multiple counseling sessions with people to attend campaign rallies with the mayoral candidate. The pastor threw his endorsement behind him, all to show that conservative evangelicals in our city would push the city toward Christ.  In the end, I think he got less than 10% of the vote.

After losing, he stopped coming to church and we never saw him again, but the church was still transforming. During that time, I was chastised for trying to bring neighborhood kids into the church. Our church was in the urban part of the city but had a decidedly “suburban” (read: white and middle class to affluent) congregation. This resulted in a ton of conflict between the local community and the church, namely caused by the church. There was no “be above reproach,” there was, “We’re here and if you don’t like it, tough.” The local community hated the church, but it’s fair because the church hated the local community. After the longtime pastor who had really grown the church retired, they brought in a firebrand pastor out of Texas who had made a name for himself down there during the beginning of the culture war in the mid-90s.

The new pastor got involved in controversy after controversy – not with affairs but pushing a political agenda. Trying to ban abortion, trying to ban gay marriage in the state constitution, pushing and making a name for himself. In a city that didn’t have a lot of conservative Southern Baptist churches, he immediately attracted theological and political conservatives alike. He became best friends with my dad and my dad became somewhat of his enforcer within the church, as much as he could be. The church grew and became one of, if not the, largest evangelical church in the city, and by far the largest Southern Baptist church in the city. The pastor’s political agenda and political sermons paid off – middle class and affluent conservatives from the suburbs drove to the interior of the city every week to come hear this man preach.

The church was situated in one of the poorest and dilapidated parts of the city. This was in the late 90s and early 2000s and even now it is still one of the poorest and most dilapidated parts of the city, though gentrification and development are shrinking in that area every year. Driving to church you’d see homeless people up and down the sidewalk, people high on dope, and of course the hour-rental motels. Across the street was one a middle school where almost every student was at or near poverty level. In high school, around the time the guy was running for mayor, I started to tutor at the middle school. On more than one occasion I left crying because I was heartbroken at the stories I would hear when I wasn’t teaching English or History. Though I had attended the church for a few years at that point, this was the first time I had ventured out into the community, unsupervised and outside of my bubble, and I saw what this world full of lost souls looked like.

I attended public school from the 9th grade onward. I was home-schooled from 5th to 8th grade and lived in a virtual Christian bubble with no contact to the outside world. When I got to go to public school, my parents were worried about the secular influence the kids would have on me. Despite this, I ended up trying to found a bible club (even though one already existed, I viewed it as “liberal”) and eventually joined the “liberal” bible club and ended up leading it. I attended one of the top public schools in the state, and our state ranked as one of the top states in the nation at the time for education. While I didn’t grow up affluent and very few of my classmates did, I and a lot of my classmates did grow up properly middle to upper-middle class. Likewise, most everyone else was a Christian who just went to a different church or at least believed in Christianity even if they didn’t attend church. Only a few people were actually atheists, but somehow most of my friends at school were the atheists. And, of course, most everyone was white.

Crossing the street, getting completely outside of not just my church bubble, but my socioeconomic bubble, for the first time in my life – and I was maybe 16 or 17 at this point – opened my eyes to what Christ meant by “the least of these.” Mentoring kids who weren’t going to have a meal when they got home. Kids who hadn’t bathed because the water got shut off. Kids who didn’t do the homework because there was no computer or no electricity and so this was their only time to get homework done. Kids with faces and arms full of bruises, burns, cuts. And yet also full of life, joy, laughter, hope, dreams, and humanity. Why hadn’t my church reached out to the least of these when they were across the street from us? If Christianity is true, then why are none of our Christian leaders leading us to righteous living by helping our neighbors? Did I mention most of the kids weren’t white?

Instead, the church would end up buying up quite a bit of the land and homes around the church. They needed to expand the parking lot and build a new sanctuary for all the growth they had. One man refused to sell because it was the only home he’d ever had, and so we did the Christian thing. We started rumors he was a pedophile and into child porn (this was in the early 2000s – revolutionized it), bought all the property right up to his boundary, made sure that everything around him would be a parking lot, and then made sure the construction site was right outside of his home. The parking lot around his house was the last thing that was finished. The pastor and my dad, as well as some other people, thought that one up, which caused the rift between my father and I to grow. But it didn’t matter, the church had its parking lot.

During my time at that church, I began to have some doubts about Christianity, but I never let them permeate too deep into my conscious. I’d find myself reading Josh McDowell or going online to apologetics message boards, but that only satisfied the intellectual part. My friends in school who were Christians were hit or miss, but the people who I ended up getting along with the most all seemed to be atheists or agnostics, or at least very progressive Christians. This pattern would repeat itself throughout my life and would continually challenge my faith. I was bullied in my youth group and the butt of a lot of jokes and resentment. I was a child with untreated ADHD, depression, and anxiety living in an abusive home environment, so you can imagine that I also wasn’t the easiest kid to get along with at that time, but that doesn’t excuse the bullying. I wasn’t bullied at school, in my “secular” environment I found that I thrived and could be more of myself. The more I discovered of myself, the more I began to forge my identity, the more I began to question the version of Christianity I had been taught.

I’d graduate and leave that church without really gravitating toward another one for a while. I wandered around in my late teens and early 20s, attempting college twice and failing within a year both times. Little known to me at the time, but I had a healthy dose of mental diseases coupled with years being in abusive, controlling environments, which is all to say I was in no position to try and go to college. Yet, I felt compelled. Then, in 2006 I was invited to be a research assistant for someone in the Intelligent Design movement AND get to attend an undergraduate program at Southwestern Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I had begun to drift away from the faith – not in any intellectual sense, but in a moral sense. This was my opportunity to maybe find a different version of Christianity than what I had grown up with. Maybe the corruption I saw within my church was limited to just that church.

When I got to seminary for my undergraduate degree, or “MDiv lite,” I found more of the same in the administration and the churches in the area. I attended one of the wealthiest churches (at the time) in the Dallas-Fort Worth Area. I had a homeless man come up to me one Sunday after the service to ask for some money. I felt bad because I didn’t have anything to give, but he was quickly ushered off. I was assured that this wasn’t regular and that “they” were kept away at the shelter where they belong.

Now, I’m not naïve and I’m not one to think that having the homeless – who are already mentally and physical vulnerable and in need of help – around the public is a great idea. I did live in New York at one point, after all. But a church of that size with those levels of resources could have helped at least one guy who was just asking for money. But throughout everything, I saw a growing disdain in the church toward the poor. My view on homelessness is to build better public housing and approach homelessness as a public health crisis and house them first and foremost before anything else. This was my view then too, I thought that was the Christian thing to call for. Yet, the Christians at the church and the seminary were adamantly opposed to any of this and argued that these people needed to find Christ and take responsibility for their lives. When I said some of them were Christians, or at least claimed to be, it was met with a “just because they say they are” attitude, implying that if you’re homeless you aren’t really a Christian, or at least not a good one.

The thing is, I was poor. Though my internship paid for the seminary education, I was given a stipend of $20-40 a week. This was meant to cover my gas and food for the entire week at a time when gas prices were beginning to jump into the $2 per gallon range. I also found out that my “internship” was essentially helping the professor with domestic duties, meaning I was driving over 90 miles from the seminary to his house on the weekends, staying there, then driving over 90 miles back to the seminary. There were days when I was so broke that I had to ask my friends for ramen noodles. My dad would help when he could, but he had given up his job for another, lost that one, and was now attempting to run his own business. What money he did have was spent on him first, necessities second, and whatever after. While this was fine when he had his old income in the old economy, this was a new, lower income in a new, worse economy.  

When I brought this up to the seminary, I was treated like I was being ungrateful, to the point I had to have a sit down with Paige Patterson. According to him, the reason I was poor was because I had a bad spirit within me – he’d point out how I dressed, that I didn’t wear pants and a tucked in shirt, that I questioned things, that I was a challenge for the sake of being a challenge (he’s not wrong, that’s accurate) – that all of this pointed to a very poor spiritual condition. Blessed are the poor in spirit but fuck the poor on earth.

I eventually lost the internship and therefore lost my free schooling, but I stuck it out as long as I could. I picked up a job with a food delivery company that would deliver from multiple restaurants – like a food app before there were apps. To the uninitiated, you’d look at our catalogue OR go online, call us, place the order, and then we’d go get your food (after placing the order with the restaurant). It was owned by an Eastern Orthodox couple, and this was my first introduction to Orthodoxy. It was also the first time that a large group of Christians treated me well – everyone in the office (almost everyone) was Orthodox. I was brought in like a member of the family. Working there allowed me the ability to continue my education.

In my education I had to take courses in evangelism. I found these annoying at every stage of my education, I found it canned, I found it prepared, I found it inauthentic. As such, I struggled to fit in while at seminary, constantly raising questions, challenging authority, being a problem.  

The evangelism classes always stuck with me and those more than anything else made me start to question the truth of Christianity. I was in my early to mid-20s at this point and so before moving to Texas had worked a number of jobs in my home state. Some of those jobs were sales jobs where we learned how to make an introduction, sales pitch, and call to action. When I took the evangelism classes there was literally no difference between the methods given or even the reasoning given – both relied on human psychology. Evangelism, the number one priority that we should have according to the seminary, was dissected before me and exposed as little more than a spiritualized sales pitch. If witnessing is supposed to open people up to Christ, if this is a moment that the Holy Spirit is supposed to be speaking through you, then why the fuck would the Creator of the Universe need to use a sales tactic? My view of Christianity began to shift and morph because I simply couldn’t match what I was raised with to what I was living with. The power of the Holy Spirit or the power of persuasion?

I was adamantly pro-life, so much so that I believed the government should offer free healthcare to pregnant women, offer housing, offer whatever it takes for them to keep their baby. I truly and honestly believed that a fetus was a human person, therefore I thought, “So what if my taxes go up? This is a human life!” Yet, I could never get anyone on board. I was constantly met with, “It’s not my responsibility to pay for their sin.” The callousness shown toward these women facing an incredibly impossible decision blew me away. I thought of the women who’d faced that difficult choice and while I disagreed with their choice (though now, through my new perspective, I realize was none of my business), I truly and honestly empathized. That empathy led me to believe that it was our responsibility to create a society where if a woman wants to have an abortion for economic reasons, then society should address those economic reasons and save the fetus.

My own financial situation coupled with just constantly getting pushed around by seminary leadership resulted in my leaving that seminary without graduating from the undergraduate program. I was left devastated. What hurt even more was that Paige Patterson wrote a letter to my father about me, accusing me of things that weren’t true, and attempting to give me a bad name to my own dad. Paige had been a friend of my family for about four decades by that point. He attended church with my grandparents and had also known my father. It was one of the only times in my life where I can remember my dad defending me against someone’s accusation. But I had put in three years of hard work only to succumb to the pressure and leave the seminary.

I only spent a year away from education before resuming it again out in North Carolina. I attended another undergraduate program at another Southern Baptist seminary. The culture out there was more relaxed and that stopped my questioning of Christianity temporarily. However, I was done with the Southern Baptists, but to keep my discount I had to remain one. I kept mostly to myself at this new school, did my best to keep my head down, and quietly thrived and finished my education.

I was fed up with the Southern Baptists. I couldn’t stand it anymore. While I had found a good church back home that belonged to the Southern Baptist Convention but had a pastor that truly loved and cared for people, it was the only church I had ever discovered (up to that point) with that quality. Plus, it was back home, and I was – by this point – out in North Carolina. I remembered the Eastern Orthodox from Texas and had been studying it deeply since then. I had attended the Antiochian parish in my area and fell in love with it but couldn’t commit myself to Orthodoxy quite yet.

It was back in Texas that I had begun to question Southern Baptist teachings because I was consuming the works of the Church Fathers. Since my focus started in history and concluded in philosophy, the Church Fathers were a treasure trove for my education. My introduction to the fathers through Athanasius’ On the Incarnation opened me to a world of Christian thinking that had been closed off entirely before. While I had come across aspects of the Church Fathers in my Christian readings, all my influencers were evangelicals, so early Christian teachings weren’t really a focus. I began to read John of Damascus, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, and quite a few others. I got ambitious in my Greek class and attempted to translate a few of the Church Fathers’ writings into English. All that to say, I was primed for Orthodoxy.

I eventually was welcomed into the Orthodox Church and received communion. Having graduated and moved off campus and holding down a career at the bank, I was free to choose. I chose the Orthodox and to this day I miss that parish. The people there were nothing but kind to me and I formed some great friendships there. It was there that I truly began to open myself up to a newer form of Christianity that was more open to the world. During a financial hardship I went to my priest to ask for prayer and instead he asked how much I needed and gave me the money, no questions asked.

That parish gave me a Christianity that I could follow and what’s more is I didn’t have to believe everyone else was going to hell. And so, I, a Protestant, had converted to Orthodoxy…around the same time a shitload of other Protestants were doing the same. But many of them were joining more conservative parishes and bringing their conservative Protestantism with them. Jerry Falwell but with smells and bells. And so, while I loved my parish and attended when I could, I slowly began to pull away from it in the last year of living in the state. I failed to see other parishes that were similar and saw far more that were becoming radicalized. The form of Christianity I found seemed to be rather rare.

I was transferred to New York with the bank and for the first time in my life I was engulfed in a fully secular society. While I had lived in a metropolitan area of North Carolina, it was still very much the Bible Belt. It was diverse and liberal enough, though, that I was exposed to other views once I graduated from the undergraduate program and moved out. Even still, most of the friends I made were black and very religious, but within the black American tradition. New York, however, is New York. By this point, my Christian faith had been shattered, and I was living in its remains and I finally realized it. While the Orthodox parish extended my stay in the Christian faith, it was in Texas that I had begun to dive into the counter arguments about Christianity.

I continued that search in New York. I had put off a lot of science because I viewed it as bunk when I was a teenager. I was taught a literal interpretation of Genesis. While I abandoned that view once I got to college, I still believed in a literal creation of Adam and Eve, just within the context of evolution – everything else evolved, not us. Yeah, I know. Being in New York, working at a bank and meeting some of the smartest people on the planet, allowed me to explore the outside world. I was introduced to ancient Sumerian beliefs in a way that weren’t presented to me in seminary. I was finally introduced to the historical evidence around the Bible that – while mentioned and covered in detail was never presented in a fair context – made me realize rather quickly that it’s just a collection of religious documents. I finally began to learn about science, throwing myself mostly into biology and cosmology. I began to discover a world that had been hidden to me and was wider, more mysterious, more discoverable, more known and unknown than any god I had ever learned about; knowledge for the sake of knowledge, being good to others just for the sake of being good to others, that we evolved to cooperate and be empathetic. In fact, there’s a good reason to think that it was our empathy and cooperation that made us as successful a species as we’ve been. It wasn’t God’s blessing; it was us.  

It was also during this time that MAGA had won the 2016 election thanks in large part to white evangelicals. Though I worked in Manhattan, I lived in a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx that was made up of mostly Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. The day after the election, getting on the bus and going to my subway stop, it was practically empty. There wasn’t panic, just depression in the neighborhood for the entire week. Meanwhile, I was watching my former seminary and church friends – some of them – celebrate and cheer and talk about “taking back America.” There was no talk of reaching out, of being a good witness, of winning the world to Christ. In their moment of triumph, they displayed their greatest failure.

The ultimate argument against Christianity is that I saw nothing special in the lives of Christians. If anything, Christians seemed to be worse than the average person I knew outside of the church. While there were Christians who showed genuine love, compassion, and kindness to me, they tended to be the exception rather than the rule, and I had faced the exact same love, compassion, and kindness from non-Christians. In fact, I found more acceptance outside of Christianity than I did inside of it. Likewise, I’ve peaked in on some former classmate’s lives and often, the ones that I got along with and who treated me well have all drifted into some vastly more open version of Christianity or completely away from the faith (such as myself). The ones I butted heads with and who were rigid toward me, or who were still nice but followed the system, have all sold-out to the new MAGA system.

Ultimately, I concluded that if Christianity is true then there should be something special about it; but there isn’t. The apologists write their books and have created an entire industry around their craft; but they can’t point to the actual proof of their faith in the lives of Christians. Christians in America have become a group of people filled with hatred and anger at people who are different than them that most people I know tend to avoid anyone who is a known churchgoer. If Christianity were true, why would God allow this to happen in his name? What is it about Christianity that makes it so special, and can you answer that question without engaging in an intellectual exercise? Can you point to the mass difference Christians are making for good in this world and how this differs from non-Christians who are also doing good in this world?

The existential reality that I faced from the cradle up until I finally escaped the entirety of the Christian bubble in my early 30s is despite all the intellectual arguments for Christianity, at no point could I use the lived experience of Christianity as evidence for Christ. Christians were no more special than others and in many ways we were worse. In my younger, more evangelical years, I’d fight all the comparisons to the Taliban or old Catholic Church. But it became impossible to defend against and so I’d just get angry. But this problem persisted my entire life and eventually it was a problem I was noticing myself.

I’m not sure I would have ever questioned my faith if I saw proof of it within Christianity itself. If the existential reality matched the taught reality, then despite any evidence to the contrary I’d always be able to point to that. But I couldn’t. And, in fact, because I failed to see this reality in the church, I began to open myself to alternatives and questions. The greatest argument against Christianity, what ultimately did me in was watching Christians try to conquer the world rather than love it and seeing absolutely no evidence of any “loving Spirit” within them.

Whether or not someone performs good actions seems to have more to do with them and their commitment to being a moral person than anything else. If there’s a religious justification for their good deeds, then so be it; we often rationalize our gut-instincts anyway. But there doesn’t seem to be anything in Christianity that makes its adherents better people. The claim of Christianity is that it will make people better. Yes, some people do become better after becoming Christians. This is also true of when they become Muslims, Buddhists, or any number of other religions. If Christianity were true, if it were the one true faith and the one way to God, then why were the most abusive people I ever knew all in the church?

Some of my friends have taken this same path, but at this point they simply adopt a more universalist approach to salvation. They still defend their reasons for believing in Christianity, but they wouldn’t condemn anyone to hell for disagreeing, they wouldn’t try to force their morality on anyone via the law unless they thought the moral violation was harming people (as in, businesses should be regulated for the general good, people should be paid more, people should be allowed to love whomever and identify however, etc.). I have nothing but respect for them in their path and their current spot. I think an incredibly intelligent, reasonable, educated person can still be a Christian and still believe that Christ died and rose again to redeem humanity. So long as your beliefs don’t result in you harming others and they help you, I’m all for it.

The lack of any existential evidence for Christianity left my philosophical defenses of it feeling hollow. By the time I graduated I could go toe-to-toe with most professors and would be able to hold my own (in the views of other Christians; in reality I would have been eaten alive). I had read hundreds of books and could boast that I had a classical education. But in all of it I never saw Christ in the church, only sparingly. I could never find any existential reason to prefer Christianity over any other religion. Sure, there were intellectual and religious ones, selfish ones (not wanting to burn in Hell), but I couldn’t point to the mass of Christians and say, “See, Christians are uniquely kind to people in this world.”

By the time of COVID, I finally admitted to myself that I was agnostic and abandoned all pretense of being a Christian. I didn’t come out or make a massive announcement, in fact I did (and sometimes still do) fake my Christianity, mostly when it’s convenient or I want to avoid a conversation. Seeing how Christians responded to the COVID crisis – and the fact the crisis was happening in general – was the final nail that allowed me to walk away from the faith entirely. In my mid-30s, after decades of education around Christianity and building an entire worldview with Christ in the center, I finally abandoned it. I could only think back to having spent all that time studying a faith that I now no longer believed. I had invested tears, relationships, my entire fucking life into that faith and its pursuit, and I found myself finally walking away.

Abandoning faith, for me, was no intellectual matter. It was a matter of having to completely shift my identity, and it’s a decision in who’s wake I still swim. At an age when I should find myself settling down into life I’m still in turbulence and defining who I am. There isn’t an intellectual argument in the world strong enough to get a person to abandon their entire worldview, a worldview around which they’ve built their entire education and identity. The only thing that can cause that to happen, the only thing that can create enough cracks for the eventual truth and knowledge to get through, is to go your entire life starved for Christ’s love and finding it primarily outside of Christ’s followers.

I think back to when I graduated. All my work, my planning to be a professor of philosophy, to go on and get my PhD and teach philosophy is a dream that died. I had the job at the bank, it was paying the bills, and even though I was attending the Orthodox Church, deep down I was watching my faith begin to crumble from the years of doubts left unanswered by the lived reality of Christianity. I took communion one last time on Pascha (Orthodox Easter) shortly before moving to New York but walked away from the cup feeling empty and dry, deep down realizing there was no truth here. I was attempting to build a house on shaky sand – despite my education, the grounding of any belief must be based in the lived experience of life if that belief is to be true, and in that lived experience I had discovered nothing but lies.

I didn’t even walk across the stage. I packed up my things, began to move into my new apartment off campus housing, and stored my books. I continued my job working at a bank, far from being a professor of philosophy. I felt like a fraud in a way, but in other ways I felt like I had completed my education. I survived Hume, Nietzsche, Darwin, Dawkins, Russel, and so many others. I had read book after book critiquing my faith and walked away more convinced than ever that I believed the truth. They each posed a challenge, but I was eventually able to form answers to their critiques. I dove deep into the philosophy of Christianity, searching for its core. But all the while the protective enamel that my upbringing had given me was chipped away by the very ones who gave it to me. I had searched Christianity and reached its truth, its core, its lived reality, and found straw.