Losing My Religion

Admin V talks about Losing her religion and Holy Week

Admin V here. It is holy week and that always makes me reflective and makes me think about my church experience growing up Southern Baptist and then doing the dive into being Anglican and then coming out on the other side.

Southern Baptists don’t do holy week or lent. For Easter, we celebrate Palm Sunday, the Lord’s Supper, and Easter Sunday. That’s it. We’d get the grape juice and the dry bread twice a year, but always around Easter. There would usually be a lot of special singing and if we were lucky, the choir would do an Easter Cantata. I have a pretty good voice and I love to sing so I would sing with the adult choir. And we’d get up early and join other local churches for a sunrise service to celebrate the tomb being rolled away. It was good, but it wasn’t all that different from a regular church service.

By the time I found Anglicanism, I was on my way out from being evangelical. The branch of Anglicanism, I joined was the conservative branch that was super anti-gay, but at the time I didn’t know that. It seemed liberal because they let women be deacons and still considered gay people Christians. Coming from being Southern Baptist, the people were bordering on being heathens and they were super catholic in their practice which at first seemed weird, but the rector preached about grace and forgiveness and a softer Christianity than I was used to and I was sucked in. Because I had read the bible and that view of Christianity matched up more with my vision of Jesus and love than any version I had seen before. And the rituals made it feel like I was practicing Christianity and not just phoning it in. I LOVED high church.

Celebrating Easter as an Anglican was a whole different experience. I did Lent and everything. I preferred adding a discipline for Lent rather than giving up chocolate or something because that felt more like a practice. Once I tried to give up saying Bless Your Heart for Lent. I failed in under an Hour so I just decided to add reading my Bible every day instead. Holy Week became super meaningful for me. I didn’t do the Christian Passover Seders that others did, because I liked to go to my Jewish friends place and celebrate with them and well, it felt a lot like cultural appropriation to take a closed practice and modify it to suit Christianity when we already had communion as an option. I went to Good Friday services and celebrating Holy Saturday was amazing and so meaningful for me. I would go to church on Saturday and the church would be silent and reverent and vaguely dark until Sundown and we’d start the Tintinnabulation with whatever noise makers we’d brought. The Lights would come on and we’d celebrate the return of the Savior from the grave.

I loved this. I felt this. I wanted to believe so badly. When I finally lost my faith, it felt like everything had been ripped away from me. The community. The rituals. The trust in the people around me. It was like losing a limb. A friend and I made a breakup playlist for our loss of faith on Spotify. Easter is often a reminder of the pain of that experience. But once you see behind the curtain, it is impossible to unsee it.

And I was unmoored. I searched for a long time for a replacement. I dabbled in looking for the Divine Feminine which is so very missing from the protestant faith. I read books on Buddhism and paganism and all the flavors of that. In the end, I couldn’t make myself believe so now I call myself a secular agnostic witch who still appreciates the words of Jesus. Lots of Christians insist that you can’t be happy without Jesus, but I can assure you that is a lie. There is no place for a single woman in the protestant church so I spent a lot of time with well-meaning people who made me feel less than for being single and unmarried. Like there was a purpose that I wasn’t fulfilling and that I wasn’t enough because no man had picked me. There is no real place for a person with questions in Christianity because well-meaning people always give thought-ending cliches and bad apologetics. Which is fine if you are someone that is satisfied with a pat answer. That wasn’t me. And I have realized that sin is a social construct and that I am worthy of love just because I am here. That wasn’t something I felt when I was a Christian.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m wrong. If it is all real, then what. And I’ve come to the conclusion that even if it is real, I’m making the right decision. I’m not willing to pay the price for fire insurance if it means that I have to live in a box where I just don’t fit. I won’t worship and all-powerful God that lets children be gunned down in classrooms. I won’t worship a God who allows an evil man to be elected as part of some divine plan that apparently includes the destruction of people’s livelihoods and the abduction of an innocent refugee to a country where he would not be safe. I won’t give up my agency to a being that seems to not care about the people around me the same way that I care. The price of fire insurance would be complacency and faith that in the end I won’t burn.

No, I choose to be an active participant in my life. I choose to treat the present moment like it matters just as much as some obscure future when all will be made clear. If God is real and he punishes me for that, it will still be worth it. I’m driving my life. The choices that I make matter. While bad things may happen to me, I can make decisions to mitigate that. And that is worth it.