A Christian friend of mine from way back, Geoff, posted on Facebook recently: “The older I get, the more convinced I am that Christianity is true. Where do you sit and why?” As it turns out, I’m what’s called a “backslider”. My story is different. This was my reply.
Interestingly, Geoff, I’m the other way round from you. I want to say this gently, kindly and, I hope, humbly: the older I get, the more convinced I am that Christianity, particularly evangelical Christianity, is not true.
A bit like Josh [another respondent to Geoff’s post], I now find Christianity’s god (a god I once passionately believed in) as implausible as the other 2,999 gods that you, Josh and I don’t believe in.
I haven’t arrived at this position through consideration of ‘ontological arguments’ like the ones that dominate Christian-atheist debates. Those gladiatorial win-or-die debates don’t interest or move me one bit. I’ve arrived here because 50 years of lived adult experience have changed me, shaped me. They’ve re-sculpted me, much like wind and sand and waves, given enough time, can re-sculpt an entire continent.
Most of the evangelical narratives and explanations I once believed in just haven’t held up as my life has steadily presented me with harder, deeper, more complex threads to weave into my own tapestry of meaning. It hasn’t been an essentially intellectual or philosophical journey for me. It’s been more raw and personal than that.
In my early twenties, when I was still a born-again Christian, I started to feel the gradual but steady weakening of my convictions about God, and about the core doctrines of my brand of Christianity (like the incarnation, the atonement, the centrality of humankind in the story of the universe, and eternal life after death). The most foundational thing to give way was the evangelical dogma around the veracity, authority and inspired status of the Bible. As many of you know, evangelical Christianity pretty much disintegrates once this doctrinal cornerstone is removed.
The process of becoming an ‘apostate’ was pretty traumatising for me. It went on for over 10 years before I made a bearable peace with it. In some ways, I’m still making my peace with it. Thing is, I was never a part-time Christian hobbyist. I was dinkum from Day 1. I gave myself heart and soul to Jesus. Those of you who knew me back then know this is true. So the disintegration of my Christian faith was like having the heart and soul ripped out of me.
In the early stages, when I still had just enough confidence to pray, I clearly remember weeping this prayer: “God, you can ask anything of me, even my life, and I’ll give it to you. Just please don’t ask me to fake what I believe in. I can’t do it. I can’t fake it, not even for you.”
That prayer set the compass bearing for the rest of my life, and it’s in the spirit of that prayer that I say in all honesty today that I don’t find the Christian picture of reality credible and I don’t find it’s arguments convincing or compelling.
A common insider’s term for people like me is backslider. It’s a mean, scathing and blindly ignorant term. It looks down on you. It tells you you’ve wilfully snubbed God, sold out on Jesus, taken the easy exit ramp from discipleship and abandoned your commitment to the truth. But think about it, especially those of you who are Christians. Think it through, deeply, practically, personally. Think what it would really mean for you, what it would really take and cost for you to pull away from a fully committed Christian life and a fully embraced Christian faith.
In my case, think bleakness, blackness, a 24×7 lead-weight in the pit of your gut. Think loneliness, helplessness, despair, terror, knees aching from prayer. Beyond any shadow of doubt, stepping out of my Christian faith took far more courage, honesty, integrity and raw vulnerability than it ever took to step into it. And that’s saying something because stepping into it had been, up to that point in my life, the biggest and boldest step I’d ever taken.
I was 17 when I “came to the Lord”. I’m now just a couple of months away from turning 70. As an old man now, I can say truthfully and happily that I treasure the gold I mined (and sometimes still mine) from the dusty ore of Christianity. But the core doctrines that underpinned my earlier Christian beliefs are just tailings and rubble to me now. I’ve weighed, pondered and explored them diligently and carefully for a long long time, like a juror sifting through a mountain of evidence in a critically important court case. On trial here is the Christian faith as I have known it. It faces the charge of being a human invention, an artefact of human religious imagination. I’ve finally reached my reluctant but heart-felt verdict. Guilty!
It truly is my verdict. To say or act otherwise would be faking it. And, as you already know, I can’t do that. And I won’t, not even for you, especially if you are one of my numerous Christian friends.
As I look back at the gorgeous, gutsy, 17-year old Christian me, I feel enormous respect, affection, and compassion for him. He was an ill-equipped boy on a man’s errand. But he was the real deal. There was no fakery in him. I’m proud to have been him. If I could go back and be whoever I wanted to be, I’d want to be him again. I’d want to walk every earnest step with him along his lonely and costly Christian path. And I’d want to become the beautiful backslider he eventually became.
My warm wishes, love and blessings to you all … Michael 😊💛
