Haven't I Heard This All Before?

For the person who grew up in church and walked out — or who feels like they did.

A specific kind of person comes to a site like this. Maybe you. You were raised in some version of the church — Sunday school, youth group, summer camp, a Bible on the dresser. You left, in your late teens or twenties or thirties, because the version you were given didn’t survive contact with the world: didn’t survive your reading, didn’t survive your relationships, didn’t survive the questions you started asking that the answers in your tradition couldn’t carry.

If that is you, I want to say a few things directly, not in the voice of an apologist but in the voice of a friend.

I’m sorry

I’m sorry for what you got. I do not know your specific tradition, or the specific failures of it, but I know enough about the patterns to guess at some of it. The biblical literalism that wouldn’t bend to honest geology. The political certainty that confused the Republican party for the kingdom of God. The shame culture that treated your questions as sin. The youth-group emotional manipulation that disguised altar calls as breakthroughs. The pastor who fell. The worship band that was a brand. The hypocrisy you saw, which was real, and which the adults in the room pretended not to see.

If any of this was your story, your leaving was not unreasonable. In many cases it was the only honest response a thoughtful person could have made to what they were being handed. I do not want to defend the thing you walked out of. Quite a lot of it was indefensible.

What I want to ask

I want to ask you to consider that what you walked out of may not be the same thing as Christianity.

The cultural Christianity of the late-twentieth-century American suburbs — the version most deconstruction stories are about — is one particular expression of one particular subculture in one particular century in one particular country. Christianity is a two-thousand- year-old global movement with believers in every culture on earth. The Coptic monks in Egypt are Christians. The persecuted Christians of the Chinese house churches are Christians. The Russian Orthodox of the steppes, the Pentecostals of Brazil, the Anglicans of Nigeria, the medieval mystics, the Cappadocian fathers, Aquinas, Bonhoeffer, Augustine of Hippo — all Christians. The thing you walked out of is one expression of a thing that is much larger and much older than that expression.

You may have walked out of a thing that was, in some serious sense, not the thing.

It is worth being honest about that before you decide you have walked out of the thing itself.

What I would ask you to look at again

If you grew up with the answers and never had the evidence, the history section is the place to start. The case for the resurrection as a historical event — not as a feeling, not as a tribal marker, not as something the youth pastor told you to just have faith about — is, I think, much stronger than most deconstructing ex-Christians realize. Most people who leave Christianity were not leaving the case; they were leaving the culture. The case is still there.

If your grievance is intellectual — the conflict with science, the problem of evil, the worry that it is all wish-fulfillment — the mind & meaning section and the origins section are written for you. The intellectual case for Christianity is not the one the youth pastor knew. It is older and tougher and more patient.

If your grievance is moral — the church’s failures, the abusers, the hypocrites, the political grotesqueries — I will not argue with you. You are right. The church has failed in those ways. The Christian claim is not that the church has been pure; it is that the church has been forgiven, and that the forgiveness is the same forgiveness on offer to everyone else. The hypocrites in the pew are part of the evidence for the gospel, not against it: the gospel is that even the people who are at this moment failing to live up to it can be made new. The hypocrites are not the counter-example. They are the test case.

You don’t have to come back the same way you left

You do not have to return to the church of your childhood. You do not have to pretend the failures didn’t happen. You do not have to forgive any of it on someone else’s timeline.

What I am asking is something much smaller. Let it be a question again. Read the case. Look at the historical evidence with adult eyes. Sit with the philosophical arguments. Read the New Testament, specifically, slowly, as if you had never read it before.

A great many people who walked out of a small, brittle version of Christianity have found, when they looked again, a larger and tougher and stranger thing waiting on the other side. Not the thing they left. The thing the thing they left was a poor imitation of.

Start, if you can, with the gospel of John. Read it in one sitting. Let it be unfamiliar. See what you see.

The rest of the site is here when you want it.