When I was very young, my dad told me about sin, and how each and every one of us, no matter how sweet, or innocent, is born with a sin nature. He picked up a black checkbook from his desk, and said, “When you come into this world, your heart is black with sin.” This conversation is among my earliest and most vivid memories. Later, while staying with my maternal grandparents, at bedtime prayers, I asked God to “forgive my sin and come into my heart.” Joyfully, my grandfather took me downstairs to share the news, and everyone hugged me and celebrated.

Years later, when I was not much older than 10, I had a breathtaking experience of the divine. One moment, I was lying in bed, staring at the wall across the room, praying. The next moment, I knew God was there. It was as if spiritual eyes were opened, or a veil was pulled back, and I realized I wasn’t alone. I knew that no matter what I said, God would hear me. And so I wasn’t sure what to say, I didn’t know what would be worth sharing in the presence of the Creator of the Universe. This happened one or two more times, but before long, it was only a memory.

As I got older, a new feeling arrived—I was attracted to girls. As a child homeschooled from day one, I could only experience that through the lens that my parents had provided. I knew it was expected, and natural, but I also knew that I could not speak openly about it with my parents. I felt a lot of shame. I didn’t want to admit that just like most boys my age, I was waking up to sexual and romantic attraction. And that was only the beginning. As I became a teen, the intimate experience of the divine that I had as a child faded, and regular teenage problems came to the foreground. I felt like God was showing me less attention. 

Then, one day, I didn’t just like girls—I started falling for boys, too. And, as time progressed, the list of girls I had interest in dwindled down to one, while I felt as though I was waking up, once again, to a whole new experience. And then there was the day I admitted it to my journal—I was gay. Later, I told my cousin, Zach, then my parents, older siblings, and close friends. Despite the realization of my queerness, I still held onto my faith, like it was the only thing keeping me from falling thousands of feet into shallow waters. I told myself I’d go into the ministry, I’d pour my life into serving God to the extent that there would be no more of me left to so much as think about marriage, and children, and life and love with another man. I read my Bible every day, and I prayed. I wrote about “living the Christian life” here on my blog. I really believed that God would not let me fall. Then, my faith began to fade. 

Around the age of 13, I began asking my father questions about Hell—how a loving, merciful God could send the majority of people to an eternity of conscious torment. His answers, in turn, were unsatisfying. Everything he offered me and everything that he showed me from centuries of Christian teaching about the matter left me feeling like there was no one in the world as worried about it as I was, no one for whom the word eternity echoed as much as it did in my mind. Many times, when my father felt pressed about the issue, he would lash out with accusations.

In a voice memo from when I was 16, my father can be heard saying, “This is hard for me to take. You know, sometimes I think you’re speaking for the devil. You don’t know your Bible well enough yet. Sometimes I just feel like you’re trying to shoot ducks in a barrel, you don’t really mean what you’re saying, I don’t know how seriously to take this ludicrousy [sic].” In reply, my soft voice can be heard asking, “Is it really ludicrous to think that maybe God cares about everybody?” And, following a long pause, my father says, “I think that you keep throwing up smokescreens, because I keep taking it down to what you really need to deal with,” by which he meant my sexuality.

So many times, as a young teen, I’d look for answers, only to have my father tell me I wasn’t genuinely seeking Christ, but only flaws, doctrinal inconsistencies, so that I could live however I pleased. My father, who had a masters in divinity, couldn’t offer satisfying answers to some of my most basic theological quandaries. And so, over time, I lost faith in Hell. I felt that if God was everything the Bible said God was, Hell must not be biblical. For a few years, I believed that everyone would make it to Heaven eventually, and if Jesus was the only way, that just meant everyone would meet Jesus at some point. 

At the age of 18, I left fundamentalism for the progressive side of Christianity. Progressive churches offered me a safe place to explore what I believed without fear of judgment, and I met so many good people who have become trusted friends and mentors. At 20, when I moved to North Dakota, I continued attending progressive churches, and kept in contact with pastor friends from back home. Looking back, sometimes it feels like this next chapter of my story was delayed, perhaps by the distraction of basic and technical training after joining the Air Force in 2020. Once I was settled down, though, I continued exploring my beliefs, and reading about the beliefs of others.

Near the beginning of 2022, I read an essay, “Everyone’s (Second) Favorite Dead Jew” by Dara Horn, which discusses the life of Anne Frank, the life she might have lived if not for her murder, and the way society objectifies her and the innocence of what she wrote in her diary. Horn writes, “The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.’ These words are ‘inspiring,’ by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her ‘legacy.’ It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being ‘truly good at heart’ before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.”

The first time I read it, I brushed off that parenthetical statement about Christianity. I convinced myself that she wasn’t right, and moved on. Despite this, it ate at me. Later, when I saw books critical of Christian apologetics, I was more open to reading them. I read How Jesus Became God and The Bible With and Without Jesus. Over time, these stripped away my belief that Jesus had ever claimed to be God, or that any prophecy had ever been about him. It wasn’t easy to let my beliefs go, but over time, they faded, and I was left only with a vague sense that the Hebrew Scriptures (the “Old Testament”) I read growing up had been accurate, and true, but I couldn’t trust the Greek Scriptures (the “New Testament”). Of course, that faded too. Various discoveries ate away at the last theistic beliefs I had, and for the first time in my life, at the age of 21, I had a genuine existential crisis.

For months, I had a surreal, ungrounded feeling, as if I could float away and cease existing at any moment. I would be sitting in my car or doing something at home, and would suddenly get this pervading feeling of absolute unknowing. I realized I didn’t know why I existed, but more than that, I didn’t know why anything existed. Of course, none of us know for sure, but when I was a Christian, I really believed I did. When I would look at something as simple as a table, or as complicated as a smartphone, my mind would spin with all the things that were needed to create that. I would wonder why I was here, in this moment in history, rather than any other moment. I would wonder if we all exist in a simulation, a video game invented by some creature slightly more advanced, watching over us. I questioned everything. I saw the social constructs that undergird every facet of our society. I was terrified. In many ways, I faced the fear that my parents seem to implicitly understand awaits them if they ever begin the journey of deconstructing their fundamentalism.

As I have had frank conversations with Christians I have a lot of respect for, I realized my mistake. In true fundamentalist fashion, I left one set of answers looking for another, and it has taken me this long to realize that no religion or philosophical framework has all the answers, or even the answers we feel we need the most. If I ever return to Christianity, it may perhaps be because I’ve learned the value of the religious community without the expectation that all views are the same, or even similar. 

Leaving Christianity completely has taught me so much. It has forced me to truly question everything I believe or think about the world. As a fundamentalist child, I believed the purpose of the universe was to give God glory. I believe that God created us, allowed us to sin, sent Jesus to die for our sin, and, yes predestined billions to Hell all for his glory. Then, as a relatively progressive Christian, I believed that world religions were all worthy of respect, but Christianity was the most right, and, when all people made it to Heaven, we’d worship Jesus together. I still had a firm belief in God, and how Christianity defined them. When I watched my progressive faith fall apart, I had little to cling to. The Zen Buddhist practice I’ve grown in for a few years didn’t help me very much, since Zen is nontheistic and not really focused on creating or supporting existential frameworks. I could use certain tools to make peace with this newfound dread of the unknown universe, but my Zen practice was not going to offer me a new cosmology, or origin story that would tap me on the head and send me away comforted.

It’s hard to come face-to-face with our existential unknowing, but it seems like something everyone should try to do in their life. Even if you are a religious person and even if you are fixed in your belief system, I still think it’s possible to look out at the stars at night and admit you don’t know why anything is here. Religious explanations are well and good, even expected. But we don’t know anything—that’s why it’s called faith. And I still have faith, despite my lack of conventional beliefs. I have faith in humanity despite a traumatic upbringing, rampant greed worldwide, and a long history of war and genocide, among so many other things, large and small. And I have faith in this planet, who has walked with us so far and who will walk another thousand miles with us, if we will lay down our greed, pride, and hatred.

Growing up, I was comforted by the fact that my parents believed in eternal security. I believed in it, too, because their scriptural explanations made sense to me. Now, I realize how shortsighted the concept is, because I’m on the other side of it. As I’ve explained, I no longer consider myself a Christian, and there was a day that I would have been terrified to hear this. Still, perhaps I should give eternal security a chance—after all, I don’t know what I’ll believe or where I’ll be in 10 years, just like my 12 year old self had no idea what he would believe or where he’d be in 10 years. But my grandparents on my father’s side, despite their belief in eternal security, say they are terrified that I will end up in Hell. Instead of having faith that “He who began a good work in [me] will be faithful to complete it,” they worry that I “went out from [them] because I was never of [them].” Not only did they see me profess my faith and share it, and grow in every fruit of the spirit—I did too. I tell you this to show you that nothing on this impermanent earth—including religion—can offer anything eternal. I thought I had eternal security—now I don’t believe in it, and it appears neither do those most worried about my “eternity.”

It can be devastating to face the fact that you may disagree with everything you believe in 10 years. It can be equally disorienting to realize that no matter how firmly you hold onto faith in anything outside of this universe, you may never know if you’re right. Many astrophysicists work on theories of the universe their whole life, and die not knowing how much of what they’ve put forth is true. In the same way, I will die someday, having no idea what, if anything, if anyone, will greet me on that other side, that may not exist at all.

It’s daunting, but it seems to me that existential questions deserve profound honesty. All I know is that I probably exist. I can’t know why, or for how long, or even how real everything is around me, or to what degree my actions are determined by all that has come before me. I can run from these truths, and sometimes there is comfort in that. Or I can let them catch up with me. I can allow myself to be drenched in existential unknowing, and simply accept it.

Death will probably be the end of me, whatever “I” am. At the very least, it will be the end of the part of me that fears death the most. I’m okay with that. I don’t want eternal security anymore. I just want to give all that is, in this present, unlikely moment, the attention it deserves.