God Damage: The Grief of Letting Go

On finding reality and hope after faith

When someone finally finds the courage to challenge long-held religious beliefs, it can cause significant distress. It is similar to a child learning that Santa isn’t real—only Santa in this case has been deeply engrained into every aspect of life, and death. While this is cognitively and psychologically a positive development because it means that experience can be built on truth rather than fantasy, it can also be deeply unsettling to have assumptions about the world crumble.

Indoctrination does not happen overnight. The typical devout Christian has a lengthy history that includes years of attending services, learning from teachers, daily devotions, reading the Bible, and praying—all pressed upon them before they were of age to develop critical thinking skills. By the time most reach the age to ask objective questions, they have already been trained that questioning is a sign of a lack of faith, and therefore, discouraged if not forbidden. Growing beyond this history is often the final stage of a faith journey, and the first step into the uncharted territory of natural reality. The reasons for leaving faith behind can be, and usually are, many—doubts about salvation can ultimately lead to doubts about the entire faith system; church leaders may too often be revealed as hypocrites; difficulties may arise in the constant cognitive requirement to project spiritual meaning into every aspect of life; constant prayer can become an obviously one-sided conversation; the endless news of confusion and distress in the world can override the imagined idea of an all-controlling and all-loving god; the Bible can be increasingly revealed as simply one more mythology. Everyone that successfully leaves faith behind has a unique story of how they realized belief was failing them. But recognizing that a worldview is not accurate is far different than replacing that worldview with one that is. A profound sense of loss can accompany the need for replacement—a loss of meaning, of having a ‘friend in Jesus,’ of community, of ritual, and of a promised afterlife. Each of these can result from the final realizations that lead to the evaporation of that last drop of belief. A natural-materialist, humanistic worldview offers a far more successful and adaptive alternative than a supernatural worldview, but coming to this realization is not always simple and is rarely without emotional cost. After being implanted, reinforced, and maintained for years, if not decades, the Christian belief system is not easily dislodged from one’s neural underpinnings.

It can be incredibly isolating to abandon faith while those in your immediate family and friend circle continue to believe. Never do Christians congratulate the newly deconverted and wish them well on their new intellectual journey. Many Christians consider even questioning the faith, let alone turning one’s back on it, as one of the worst possible evils, and so the separation that accompanies one’s evolution beyond Christianity becomes even more profound. In this light, it is worth pondering the similarities and differences between a person who abandons the Christianity they have known all their life and someone who abandons a cult that they may have joined as an adult (although the overlap between Christianity and any other cult is arguably complete, outside of the greater acceptance of Christianity by society at large). While both a Christian and someone leaving a cult can learn valuable lessons from therapists or cult deprogrammers about how to deal with power dynamics, belief systems, and thought processing, a person leaving the cult has an additional potential comfort available to them in the form of a return to how things were before they joined the cult—to the welcoming family and friends that are so happy they have once again found reason. Someone leaving Christianity does not often have this solace as a possibility, because there is usually no life before Christianity to return to. In most cases, family and friends are, and have always been, Christian, and they cannot help but see the newly deconverted as ‘infidel’ at best or ‘blasphemer’ at worst. On a side note, there are also many—especially in the US--who are originally indoctrinated with mainstream Christianity and eventually become members of Christian-adjacent cults. They too don’t have the benefit of returning to a ‘normal’ way of life because their pre-cult ‘normal’ was also encapsulated by belief. In fact, they may actually have to deconstruct or deprogram from multiple layers of ideologies and worldviews.

As devastating as the loss of a worldview can be, it does not have to remain ‘the end’ of a previous life. In fact, it is much better framed as the ‘beginning’ of something, and this time, a beginning of something within one’s control and of one’s own choosing. Understanding reality as reality—rather than as the endlessly-adapted projections of a multi-millennial-long line of previous Christian pastors, story-tellers, apologetics, and believers—is naturally grounding. In my own experience, as distressing as it was escaping fundamentalist Christianity decades ago, there was a sense of relief as my day-to-day reality made far more sense to me than it used to, and I realized I no longer had to imagine the workings of invisible beings within every circumstance and coincidence in my life. It was also freeing to let go of the compulsive need to say prayers to the great and powerful Oz-like ‘god,’ somewhere behind the metaphorical curtain, or to his allegedly all-loving, all-comforting son, who never once actually acknowledges gratitude or responds in times of need. This did not happen overnight, but as reality replaced my previous supernatural understanding, it did so in a way that gradually and considerately took up all available psychological space, filling in gaps and answering questions that had for so long been left up to the nebulous ‘we can never know the mind of god’ answer, common in Christian circles for anything that challenges available evidence or remains unanswerable. I felt genuinely and effortlessly grounded for the first time, rather than having to maintain an illusion of grounding—all the while hoping not to unnecessarily upset the invisible beings that controlled the universe behind the scenes. It is possible to achieve an understanding of reality that was not available with belief—an understanding of reality based upon evidence and no longer in doubt, no longer dependent on emotions, imagination, or an ancient book. In all of human history, a relatively small percentage of humans have successfully disentangled themselves from the supernatural. It is a remarkable accomplishment, especially for those who started off in a lane of childhood indoctrination. Be proud of yourself if you are one of these few, not willing to handicap your own critical thinking for illusions of comfort. For those of you not yet there but have doubts about faith, follow the evidence, and be open to the possibility that you may be trapped in a cycle of generation after generation of believers who, with the best of intentions, teach their children that pretending is the answer.

The elements of community and ritual that are associated to Christianity and other faith traditions may still offer benefit to believers in a modern age, but the damage accomplished by faith far outweighs any potential positives. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that these benefits cannot be found without the requirement of belief in things for which there is no evidence, or that psychological comfort requires a suspension of intellect and critical thought. The desire to be better humans is a noble concept with or without the need to call it ‘morality.’ The depth of connection that results from having survived religion and faith far outweighs any superficial connections that can be had from belonging to the same brand of Christianity. Simply put, life is better after religion.