I stood outside the Whole Foods in Wichita, Kansas, having just finished my shift.
It was early fall 2021. The air carried the scent of autumn, but the sun was still warm. I pulled off my mask and looked up at the sky. It was gorgeous outside—a rare enough thing in Kansas to make you stop and notice it.
Standing in the parking lot, I had a thought.
There is no God.
In the past, whenever I had an existential crisis, I knew what to do. I would turn to devotional reading to soothe my soul. For me, “devotional” usually meant Francis Schaeffer, Vladimir Solovyov, Hans Urs von Balthasar, or another theologian who could give my anxiety an intellectual framework. Yes, this counted as devotional reading for me.
I would read. I would pray. I would think through the problem until I found a way to reconcile it with everything else I believed. Eventually, the crisis would pass, my faith would remain intact, and I would get back to work.
But I couldn’t turn to God this time. God was the very thing I was questioning.
All my seminary education, all the hundreds of books I had read on apologetics, philosophy, theology, and biblical history, and all my arguments and carefully constructed explanations suddenly felt like straw burning in the wind.
I climbed into my car, shut the door, and burst into tears.
The last few years had been difficult. I had left New York and returned to Kansas to help my father start a business. Then COVID hit. The business fell apart. My father developed cancer, and although he survived the cancer itself, complications from surgery left him moving in and out of hospitals. Some days I didn’t know whether I needed to prepare for him to die or for him to come home.
Meanwhile, I was miserable at Whole Foods, wondering what the hell had happened to the life I thought I was building.
Someone could look at all of that and conclude that I stopped believing because life grew difficult.
But life had been difficult before.
For most of my life, suffering drove me toward God. When the world stopped making sense, God made sense of it. When I couldn’t find hope in my circumstances, I found it in Christ. When I couldn’t understand why something had happened, I could at least believe that someone understood.
That answer no longer worked.
I don’t think I decided to become an atheist in that parking lot. Belief doesn’t usually work that way. I didn’t conduct a final philosophical analysis, write the arguments on a whiteboard, and circle atheism at the bottom.
It was more like discovering that I had arrived somewhere before realizing I had been walking toward it.
At that moment, atheist felt more honest than Christian. I would eventually settle into something closer to agnosticism, but that distinction didn’t matter while I sat in my car crying. I had spent most of my life believing that God was there. I had spoken to him. Worshipped him. Studied him. Structured my identity around him.
And suddenly I didn’t believe he existed.
That is a very clinical way to describe something that, in fact, scared the ever-loving shit out of me.
Evangelicals teach you how to give a testimony. The details vary, but the basic structure usually remains the same: I was lost. I was a sinner. I needed Jesus. Then Jesus saved me.
It feels strange to have another testimony now, only moving in the opposite direction.
This is mine.
I am writing this because people like me are constantly asked why we left Christianity, only to be told the answer. We wanted to sin. We were deceived by secular culture. We were offended by someone at church. We made politics more important than Jesus. We never understood Christianity. We were never real Christians in the first place.
No.
At least, that isn’t what happened to me.
I was hurt by churches. Politics mattered. I encountered Christians whose behavior led me to question everything they claimed about the Holy Spirit's transforming power. I developed moral, historical, theological, and intellectual questions I could no longer answer honestly.
But none of those things, by themselves, explain why I stopped believing.
I did not leave Christianity because of one bad church, one unanswered prayer, one troubling Bible passage, one election, one hypocritical Christian, or one philosophical argument. My faith rested on an entire structure of beliefs. God seemed philosophically necessary. Christianity appeared historically defensible. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus offered an answer to human suffering. The Holy Spirit was supposed to make Christians different, to transform us into something the world could not produce on its own.
Over time, each of those claims came under strain.
That process was deconstruction.
Deconstruction and deconversion are not the same. Deconstruction was the long, uneven process of examining what I believed and why. It began while I was still a committed Christian, and for most of that time I expected Christianity to survive it. I wasn’t looking for reasons to stop believing. I was looking for reasons to keep believing.
Deconstruction was everything that came before the parking lot. Deconversion was the parking lot itself.
What followed was grief, fear, and anger, along with the slow realization that abandoning Christianity did not mean I had abandoned everything Christianity once helped me name. I still cared about truth, suffering, justice, mercy, love, forgiveness, and what we owe to one another. I simply no longer knew whether any of those things required God.
I still don’t.
This is the story of why Christianity stopped carrying the weight I had placed on it, and what I found when I finally admitted it no longer could.
I Believed It
My Christianity did not begin as oppression but as refuge.
Some of my earliest memories of church are of dark hallways, graham crackers, and orange juice that was probably two percent juice and ninety-eight percent sugar. There were Bible stories, puppets, and adults who seemed genuinely happy to have me there.
At seven years old, during the First Gulf War, I became terrified by what was happening in the world. My first-grade teacher, who was also the pastor’s wife, told me that if I accepted Jesus, I would know I would go to heaven.
That night, I asked Jesus into my heart. A few weeks later, I was baptized.
Telling a frightened seven-year-old that he needs to decide where he will spend eternity is, when I look back on it, kind of fucked up. But I don’t remember Christianity as nothing but fear. That would be easier, perhaps, but it wouldn’t be honest.
During that same period, my father began an affair. Our home became an unpredictable place filled with arguments, threats, and anger, much of which fell on me. Eventually, my mother had enough—not enough to leave, because she didn't believe she had any realistic way to do so, but enough to start taking my brother and me to church without him.
The men at that church were kind to me.
I was a hyperactive child with undiagnosed ADHD and a desperate need for male approval. At home, I was regularly insulted, mocked, or hit. At church, men listened to me, prayed with me, and told me that Jesus loved me and that what happened at home wasn’t my fault.
Maybe they should have done more. Looking back, they almost certainly should have. But they gave a frightened boy what he needed, and I remain grateful for that.
Christianity was not something imposed on an otherwise happy childhood. It offered me an explanation for why the world was broken and the promise that it would not remain so forever. It gave me adults who treated me with kindness when it was in short supply.
It also gave me somewhere to belong.
For a few years, I was homeschooled, which meant church became almost my entire social world. Unfortunately, the other kids at church did not always share the adults’ enthusiasm for my presence.
I was a serious kid. The kid who wanted to become a preacher. The kid who wanted to discuss the Bible when everyone else wanted to play basketball or talk about whatever normal kids talked about. I was awkward, intense, and always ready for a debate.
Which, as it turns out, is not a reliable strategy for becoming popular.
I was mocked and bullied by my peers at church. People I called friends often kept me around because I was an easy target. Yet none of that made me think Christianity was false. I thought these Christians were failing to live up to something beautiful and true.
And there were beautiful moments.
I remember attending youth camp at Windermere in Missouri. MercyMe was there, years before “I Can Only Imagine” became one of the most recognizable songs in Christian music. I remember them playing it. I remember us being among the first audiences, if not the first, to hear it live. I can’t prove we were the first, but I remember Bart saying in 1999 that he’d written the song about his father and wanted to perform it for us.
The most important thing is I remember what that song meant to me.
Heaven was real. Jesus was real. Someday I would stand in his presence, and all the fear, confusion, and pain of this life would finally make sense. I did not treat it as a metaphor or a comforting possibility. I believed it.
The intellectual side of Christianity appealed to me just as strongly. Even as a child, I had questions. Why did the creation stories seem different? Why did God command the killing of children? Why did God say, “Let us make humanity in our image”? Why command Israel to have no other gods if no other gods existed?
Around eleven or twelve, a youth pastor handed me an apologetics book by Josh McDowell. I no longer remember which one. What I do remember is discovering that Christianity had answers. I was hooked.
I disappeared into books. Josh McDowell led me to Lee Strobel, who in turn led me to William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Alvin Plantinga, and others far outside the evangelical world I had been raised in. By my early twenties, I was reading Christian philosophy for fun. By thirty, I had read hundreds of books on philosophy, apologetics, theology, biblical studies, and church history.
I don’t say this to position myself as the smartest person in the room. I rarely am, even when alone. I say it because I need to define what Christianity was to me.
I believed God was logically necessary. Everything in the universe appeared contingent—it existed, but it did not have to. Evolution might explain the development of life, and physics might explain the development of the universe, but every explanation seemed to lead back to another contingent reality that needed explaining. Eventually, I believed, something or someone had to exist that did not depend on anything else.
That stopping point was God.
From there, I reasoned that God must be loving. A maximal God who lacked love would be selfish and incomplete. Creation itself was a kind of sacrifice: God plus anything else was less than God alone, yet God created anyway.
And if God was eternally loving, then God must have loved someone before the universe existed. The Father eternally loved the Son. The Son eternally loved the Father. And the Spirit ensured that their love did not become self-focused on the two. The Trinity was not simply a doctrine I accepted because a church told me to. Thinkers such as John of Damascus helped me see it as the logical consequence of what God is.
I can see holes in that reasoning now. That is not the point. At the time, it made perfect sense.
Christianity explained why there was something rather than nothing. It explained why human beings possessed value. It explained why evil felt like more than personal dislike. It explained why suffering was real yet temporary. In Jesus, God entered human suffering rather than remaining distant from it. Through the Holy Spirit, God continued to work in the world, transforming ordinary people into something they could never become by their own strength.
Christianity did not merely explain what the universe was. It explained what the universe was for. It explained what I was for.
By the time I finished high school, I believed God had called me to ministry. I might become a pastor, a theologian, or an apologist, but whatever form it took, I would devote my life to Christianity. I did not just attend church or assent to a set of doctrines. I gave Christianity my future.
That is why the failures I encountered did not immediately destroy my faith. When Christians behaved terribly, I blamed the Christian rather than Christ. When one church became corrupt, I searched for a better church. When an answer no longer satisfied me, I found a more sophisticated one.
Christianity had to be true. For a long time, I could not imagine any other possibility.
The First Cracks
After my father rededicated his life, things at home changed. They didn’t improve. They just became spiritual.
In the Southern Baptist world, rededication is what happens when someone who has already accepted Jesus wanders away from the faith and then returns. My father came to believe that his affair and the collapse of our family were the result of not taking Christianity seriously enough, so he began to take it very seriously.
The Bible was the literal, inerrant Word of God. God had established an order within the family. Children obeyed their parents. Wives submitted to their husbands. Men answered to God.
Within a few years, we left the church I had loved and entered a far more fundamentalist form of Christianity. The anger and punishment at home did not disappear. They acquired biblical justifications.
This was the world where I learned to distinguish between Christianity and Christians.
Christianity was true, beautiful, and perfect. Christians were fallen human beings who often failed to live according to it. Whenever the two contradicted each other, Christianity received the benefit of the doubt.
That distinction allowed my faith to endure almost anything.
The church we attended, Immanuel Baptist, was located in one of the poorer parts of Wichita. Most of its members did not live in the neighborhood. They drove in from the wealthier and overwhelmingly white suburbs, attended church, and then drove home.
Across the street was an urban middle school whose students were predominantly Black.
During my senior year of high school, I volunteered as a tutor. My pastor did not approve. I could never understand why. The church was constantly talking about reaching the world for Christ. We raised money for missionaries to travel thousands of miles, yet the children across the street might as well have lived in another country.
The church had plenty to say about abortion. It had plenty to say about homosexuality. It had plenty to say about sexual purity.
But it had fuck all to say about the poverty immediately outside its doors, except to condemn the people living in it—or proudly purchase a neighborhood home and convert it into a parking lot.
That bothered me because I was reading the Bible. I kept encountering the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. I kept reading the prophets condemn people for exploiting the vulnerable. I kept encountering Jesus among the people respectable religious believers preferred to avoid. Then I looked around the church and asked what seemed like a straightforward question:
Why aren’t we doing this?
The youth group created another problem. Teenagers who knew how to look Christian were rewarded, regardless of what they did outside church. They came from the right families, said the right things, and knew when to raise their hands during worship. Some were given leadership positions even as they behaved in ways that directly contradicted everything we claimed to believe.
Meanwhile, asking too many questions could make someone a problem.
I was frequently a problem.
The lesson I absorbed, long before I could articulate it, was that Christian institutions often rewarded conformity more reliably than character. What mattered was not necessarily whether the Holy Spirit had transformed you. What mattered was whether you knew how to perform transformation in ways the people above you recognized.
Still, I did not think this made Christianity false.
Teenagers can be cruel anywhere. Pastors can fail. Churches can lose their priorities. None of that meant Jesus was wrong. It meant we were wrong about Jesus.
If anything, the contradiction drove me deeper into Christianity. I wanted to find the version that people hadn't corrupted.
My first attempt at college ended badly. My grandfather died, I entered an existential crisis, and I dropped out. For several years, I wandered intellectually and otherwise, reading anyone who promised that Christianity could survive serious examination.
Eventually, I enrolled at Dallas Baptist University.
For the first time, I found professors who enjoyed my questions. They encouraged me to read primary sources rather than relying on someone else’s summary. I could read Augustine rather than solely reading what a Baptist theologian said about him. I could read philosophers rather than apologetic explanations of them.
It was wonderful. Yet something small happened that stayed with me.
Before a worship service one evening, I made a joke. One of the worship leaders told me to calm down because they were trying to set the mood. I stopped.
“What do you mean, ‘set the mood’?”
She explained that the music, lighting, and atmosphere were intended to put people in the proper emotional state for worship.
Wait. We were creating this feeling? Manufacturing it?
I believed worship was an encounter with the Holy Spirit. The music might accompany that encounter, but it should not be needed to manufacture it. If God was present, why did we need to manipulate the room to make it feel as though he was?
It seemed like a small question. Small questions tend to accumulate.
Around the same time, I visited First Baptist Dallas. My grandparents had attended the church decades earlier under W. A. Criswell, and I was curious about the place. After a Sunday service, a homeless man approached me outside the building and asked if I had anything to spare. I was a poor college student with about twenty dollars to last until the following week.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I only have twenty dollars and—”
He immediately stopped me.
“Oh, no, it’s okay. Don’t worry, man. God bless you.”
He moved on and began asking other people who were leaving the church. Most ignored him or refused to speak with him. Eventually, several deacons escorted him off the property. One of them approached me afterward and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t worry, son. We don’t normally have that happen here.”
I didn’t understand.
“Have what happen?”
“Being bothered by the homeless.”
“He wasn’t bothering me. I felt bad that I couldn’t help him.”
The deacon looked at me as if he were about to impart ancient wisdom. “Son, enabling these creatures is the most unloving thing you can do. We have a ministry for them. This place isn’t for them, at least not in their condition.”
Two poor men had been standing in a sea of wealth. The homeless man recognized that I had little to give and immediately left me alone. The church recognized that he had nothing and cast him out.
“This place isn’t for them.”
Then who the fuck was it for?
I did not leave Christianity after that encounter. I did what I had always done: I searched for a Christianity that could explain why this version had gone so wrong.
Then I discovered Francis Schaeffer.
Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There changed the course of my life. He gave me a Christianity that was both intellectual and existential. Christianity could not retreat into private feelings or comforting religious language. It made claims about reality, and those claims had to be true in the real world.
He also insisted that Christians could not merely imitate the world by attaching religious vocabulary to what everyone else was already doing. Christianity was supposed to operate through the Holy Spirit’s power. A Christian community should therefore display something that human technique, institutional power, and emotional manipulation could not produce.
At first, that idea strengthened my faith.
Bad churches did not disprove Christianity. They showed what happened when Christians stopped depending on the Holy Spirit. Manipulated worship, selective morality, institutional conformity, and contempt for the poor were not the fruits of Christianity. They were signs that Christians had adopted the world's methods.
But Schaeffer had unintentionally given me a standard for judging the church. If the Holy Spirit was actually present, where was the difference?
After I ran out of money and had to leave Dallas Baptist, a strange series of events led me to a lecture by William Dembski at the University of Kansas. He invited me to dinner afterward, and during our conversation, he offered me the chance to become his research assistant at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
I interpreted the offer as providence.
God had opened a door. I would study apologetics under one of the most prominent figures in intelligent design and in Christian apologetics, receive a theological education, and prepare for the life God had called me to live.
I went to Southwestern believing the problems I had encountered stemmed from Christians who did not take Christianity seriously enough.
I was about to discover what happened when those problems became institutionalized.
Playing the Game
Seminary was supposed to be a place where people took Christianity seriously.
Instead, Southwestern taught me how seriously Christians could take the appearance of Christianity.
The assistantship covered my tuition and housing, but I was responsible for food, books, and most other expenses. Because the position required me to travel to Waco nearly every weekend, finding a part-time job was difficult. At one point, I was living on between $20 and $40 a week.
I treated the hardship as part of my calling. Christians throughout history had sacrificed even more than regular meals to follow God. If this was where God wanted me, God would provide enough to keep me there.
Usually, he did. Barely.
Poverty did not damage my faith. If anything, it reinforced it. I believed I was sacrificing comfort to pursue truth.
What bothered me was the institution surrounding that sacrifice.
Southwestern had strict rules governing student behavior, theology, church attendance, relationships, and even appearance. That did not initially trouble me. I believed Christians should live differently from the world. If we were preparing for ministry, perhaps we should be held to a higher standard.
The problem was that the standard was not applied consistently.
The students who succeeded were not necessarily the most honest, compassionate, or spiritually mature. They were the ones who knew how to play the game. They came from the right families, built relationships with the right people, dressed and spoke appropriately, and knew which questions to ask in public.
They knew how to appear submissive without necessarily possessing humility. A talent I never acquired.
People with connections or promising futures could receive grace, while those who questioned authority often received discipline.
I questioned authority.
Before I arrived at Southwestern, my father had confronted the pastor of Immanuel Baptist over allegations about the pastor’s conduct. My father had once considered him a close friend, but the confrontation eventually contributed to my parents being pushed out of the church.
The pastor also had connections at Southwestern.
I later learned that someone from the church had contacted seminary leadership to warn them about me. I cannot know everything that was said in that conversation, nor can I prove that every conflict I experienced afterward began there.
I do know what happened next.
I was repeatedly treated as if I had arrived on campus with a disciplinary record that did not exist. I was summoned to Paige Patterson’s office more than once and chastised for my attitude and behavior. Patterson eventually wrote to my father, describing me as spiritually lost, in violation of the seminary covenant, and a poor example to others.
The accusations were not true.
I will not pretend to be neutral about Paige Patterson. What he said about me was false, and his position gave those falsehoods institutional authority. It did not matter what I had actually done. The seminary president had spoken, and I became the problem he described.
That experience taught me something about religious authority. Once an institution labels someone rebellious, almost anything that person does can be treated as further evidence of rebellion. Defending yourself demonstrates pride. Questioning an accusation demonstrates an unwillingness to submit. Anger at being treated unjustly demonstrates a spiritual problem.
The system always has an answer, and the answer is always the system.
The clearest example was a friend of mine.
He was gay, though he was trying to live according to the sexual ethic Southwestern required. He did not demand that the seminary change its theology. He did not publicly advocate for same-sex relationships. He acknowledged his sexuality while remaining celibate.
Then someone outed him.
They removed him from campus almost immediately.
That made no sense to me. If Southwestern believed same-sex sexual activity was sinful, my friend was doing exactly what the institution demanded. He was not acting on his sexuality. He was trying to live faithfully within the rules.
His only mistake was being honest about who he was.
I complained to the provost. I expected a theological discussion, or at least an explanation of which policy my friend had violated.
Instead, I was told I had a “spirit of homosexuality” around me. Of all the sexual urges I have ever experienced, same-sex attraction has never been among them. Apparently, empathy is gay.
That phrase revealed more than its speaker likely intended. My concern did not need to be answered because it could be diagnosed. I did not see an injustice because something unjust had occurred. I saw an injustice because a corrupting spirit had distorted my judgment.
Once again, the institution had made itself impossible to question. If I agreed, the institution was right. If I disagreed, my disagreement proved that something was spiritually amiss with me.
Years later, Southwestern’s own trustees would terminate Patterson after receiving new information about his handling of a student’s sexual-abuse allegation while he was president at another seminary. The trustees said the information and Patterson’s representations to them were inconsistent with Southwestern’s “biblically informed core values.”
That later decision does not prove what happened to me. My experience does not prove every allegation about Patterson, either.
But when I read the announcement, I recognized the pattern. Protect the leader. Question the vulnerable person. Treat the challenge as a threat to the institution. Act only when protecting the leader becomes more dangerous than removing him.
I had entered Southwestern believing that stricter Christianity would produce more faithful Christians. Instead, I encountered the same manipulation, favoritism, fear, and protection of power I had seen elsewhere—only now it came with a degree and biblical citation.
That still did not make me an atheist. It led me to conclude that Southern Baptists were wrong.
That distinction matters. I had not yet lost confidence in Jesus, the Bible, or God's existence. I had lost confidence in the institutions that claimed to represent them. I still believed a true church had to exist somewhere. It simply had to be older, deeper, and less captive to American evangelical power.
In 2010, I left Southwestern and transferred to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina (Baptists are not known for creativity in naming; that’d make them too Pentecostal).
No one there knew me. I could attend class, study philosophy, and ask questions without every conversation carrying a preexisting accusation.
My experience was better. By then, I had learned not to trust an institution just because it knew how to speak about God.
If the modern church had become corrupted, I would go backward. I would read the writings of those who lived before Southern Baptists, before the Reformation, and before American evangelicalism. I would find Christianity before institutions had learned to turn power into doctrine.
I went in search of the original church. That search led me to Eastern Orthodoxy.
It also brought me closer to the end of my faith.
In Search of the Original Church
I did not leave Southwestern believing Christianity was false. I left believing Southern Baptists were too young.
The denomination had existed for less than 200 years. Protestantism itself was only about 500 years old. Christianity had existed for fifteen centuries before either appeared. If the modern church had become corrupted by politics, money, celebrity, and power, perhaps the solution was to return to a Christianity that existed before any of those institutions did.
At Southeastern, I began reading the early Christians more seriously. I read Athanasius, Origen, Augustine, Clement of Alexandria, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, John of Damascus, the Gregories, and the Desert Fathers. Later, I encountered Russian thinkers such as Vladimir Solovyov, S. L. Frank, and Pavel Florensky.
I was searching for Christianity before Christianity learned to pledge allegiance to the American flag.
Eastern Orthodoxy appeared to offer exactly that. It did not present itself as one denomination among thousands. It claimed continuity with the church founded by the apostles, preserved through its bishops, sacraments, liturgy, and theology.
That appealed to every part of me.
Intellectually, Orthodoxy possessed a philosophical and theological tradition older than anything I had encountered in evangelicalism. Spiritually, its worship was reverent, mysterious, and beautiful. Institutionally, it seemed less vulnerable to whatever new idea happened to be selling books or filling auditoriums that year. And despite having a hierarchy, it seemed to be one of the most disorganized organized religions I’d ever encountered. I fell in love.
American evangelicalism seemed capable of reinventing Christianity every Sunday morning. Orthodoxy claimed it did not need to reinvent anything.
It also explained what I had experienced. The Christians who had hurt me were not evidence against Christianity. They were evidence of what happens when Christians become detached from the historic church.
That distinction allowed me to keep believing.
In 2014, after completing my degree in Christian Studies, I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy.
It is important to note that my Orthodox church treated me well. All Saints was not another abusive congregation waiting to join my list of grievances. The people there welcomed me. When I needed financial help, my priest assisted me without interrogation or humiliation. He didn't make me prove I deserved compassion.
I still speak highly of him and of many of the people I knew there. Good people complicate clean arguments.
No one at All Saints drove me away from Christianity. If anything, their kindness delayed my departure. They showed me that a church could hold firm convictions without treating every wounded or questioning person as a threat.
When I moved to New York in 2016, I gradually stopped attending church. There was no dramatic confrontation. No priest denounced me from the pulpit, and no one escorted me from the building. I was just tired.
For most of my life, the church had required something of me. It required attendance, service, theological agreement, financial sacrifice, political caution, sexual conformity, and an endless willingness to forgive institutions that rarely acknowledge wrongdoing. Even when I still believed, I no longer had the energy to perform belief for others.
But I continued to study.
That had always been my solution. When Christians disappointed me, I read theology. When theology grew confusing, I read philosophy. When modern Christianity seemed shallow, I read ancient Christianity. This time, the books did not restore the structure. They exposed the cracks within.
I once imagined early Christianity as a relatively unified church defending apostolic truth against a succession of strange outsiders. There was Christianity, and then there were heresies that sought to corrupt it. The church fathers preserved the original faith, the councils clarified it, and the Holy Spirit ensured that truth prevailed.
The history is absolutely not that simple or clean.
The earliest Christian communities differed substantially in belief and practice. Different groups appealed to Jesus, the apostles, scripture, revelation, and inherited tradition, yet they disagreed about who Jesus was, how salvation worked, which writings carried authority, and what a faithful Christian life required. The form of Christianity scholars often call “proto-orthodox” eventually prevailed, but it developed amid competition with other Christian movements rather than appearing everywhere in a single, fully articulated form. Cambridge’s overview of proto-orthodox Christianity describes that development and notes that no formal creed governed the entire church before Nicaea.
The people traditionally grouped together as “the Gnostics” were not even a single, coherent rival church. The label compresses a range of movements, texts, and beliefs that sometimes differed as much from one another as from emerging orthodoxy. Michael Williams’s Rethinking “Gnosticism” argues that the category can obscure more than it explains.
These Christians drew on Greek philosophy to explain their faith. So did the Christians who defeated them.
They certainly reached different conclusions. I am not suggesting that every early Christian belief was equally sensible, equally ancient, or equally faithful to Jesus. Diversity does not prove that orthodoxy was false. Losing a theological argument does not make someone right, any more than winning one makes someone wrong.
Nor did the Council of Nicaea invent the divinity of Jesus from nothing. Christians had been debating Jesus’s relationship to God long before Constantine convened a council.
But councils did not descend from heaven bearing completed creeds. Bishops argued, interpreted scripture, formed alliances, and voted. Emperors intervened. The resulting decisions were sometimes enforced through exile and political power. Ramsay MacMullen’s history of the early councils examines that very human process.
A Christian can believe the Holy Spirit worked through that process. I did.
The problem was that the process itself could not demonstrate that the Holy Spirit had guided it. The winners interpreted their victory as evidence of God’s preservation of the church, while the people they defeated believed they were preserving the truth, too.
I began reading the church fathers differently. Previously, I had read Irenaeus or Athanasius as authoritative witnesses to Christianity’s enemies. Now I read them as participants in a struggle over what Christianity would become.
That did not make them dishonest, merely human.
They argued passionately, interpreted their opponents through their own assumptions, and sometimes described rival Christians in ways those Christians would not recognize. The labels “orthodox” and “heretic” were not always neutral descriptions waiting to be discovered. They also arose from arguments, exclusions, councils, and victories.
This struck at the reason I had become Orthodox.
I had not converted only because I preferred incense, icons, or ancient liturgy. I converted because I believed God had preserved an identifiable church throughout history. Its survival and continuity showed that the Holy Spirit had not abandoned it.
But history gave me no access to an untouched original church.
I could find both older and newer traditions. I could find beliefs that developed earlier and those that developed later. I could find bishops insisting they possessed apostolic authority, while other bishops made the same claim. Everywhere I looked, I found Christians interpreting Jesus through inherited texts, philosophical categories, political circumstances, and disputes with other Christians.
Perhaps God had guided one of those traditions. History could not tell me which one without first assuming the theological conclusion I was trying to establish.
For the first time, the problem was not simply that Christians had failed Christianity.
I no longer knew which Christianity they had failed.
Where Was the Holy Spirit
The history of Christianity had shaken my confidence that God preserved one identifiable church. But it forced me to confront a more basic question, one that had followed me since seminary.
Where was the Holy Spirit?
After I stopped working as Dembski’s research assistant, I took a job in retail sales. I learned to build rapport with customers, uncover their needs, anticipate objections, and guide them toward a decision.
There was nothing inherently sinister about any of this. That’s how sales works. What unsettled me was how familiar it felt. Every sales strategy I learned had a counterpart in apologetics or evangelism. Every single one.
In sales, I learned to identify what a customer values and present the product in a way that appeals to them. In apologetics, I learned to find common ground and present Christianity in a way that satisfies them. In sales, I learned to reframe objections. In evangelism, I learned to treat objections as symptoms of a deeper spiritual need.
I began to wonder whether I had learned to defend Christianity or simply learned to close a spiritual sale.
When I raised this issue, the usual response was that God worked through the abilities he had given us. If I used logic to persuade someone, the Holy Spirit was using my logic. If a church used music and lighting to draw people into worship, the Holy Spirit was using the atmosphere.
The answer felt like cheating.
Any successful technique could be attributed to God after the fact. If the argument persuaded someone, the Holy Spirit had worked through it. If it failed, the person had resisted the Holy Spirit. Either outcome left the belief untouched.
This was a God who raised people from the dead. Surely, he could do something more impressive than employ a sales strategy.
I did not expect every Christian to perform miracles. I did not expect Christians to become morally perfect. I certainly wasn’t.
But Christianity made an observable claim about what the Holy Spirit did. The Spirit transformed people, and the fruit of that transformation was supposed to include love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
I expected to see some evidence of that when Christians acted collectively.
For years, individual Christians let me keep believing. I knew Christians who were compassionate, honest, generous, and brave. The people at All Saints had treated me with genuine love. Whenever the institutional church disappointed me, I could point to them and say, “There. That is what the Holy Spirit looks like.”
The problem was that I also knew atheists, agnostics, and people from other religions who displayed the same qualities. Secular organizations had sometimes treated me with as much compassion as churches, and occasionally they treated me better.
Good Christians proved that Christians could be good. They did not prove that Christianity produced something human beings could not produce without it.
Then came the 2016 election.
There’s an easy, inaccurate version of this story in which Christians voted for Donald Trump, I became politically liberal, and therefore I stopped believing in God.
That, of course, is unmitigated bullshit.
A vote is not a theological argument, or at least it shouldn’t be. Christians can disagree on taxes, courts, abortion, immigration, and the proper size of government. They can vote for a deeply flawed candidate if they believe the alternative would cause greater harm. Political disagreement does not disprove the resurrection.
What disturbed me was how quickly moral principles shifted once political power became possible.
I had spent my life among Christians who insisted that character mattered. Private sin revealed the condition of the heart. A leader’s sexual behavior mattered. His treatment of women mattered. His honesty mattered. Christians had a responsibility to judge leaders by a higher standard because leadership was a moral calling.
Then Donald Trump became the Republican nominee, and apparently none of that mattered.
This isn’t merely my middle-aged memory playing tricks on me. PRRI polling found that in 2011, only 30% of white evangelical Protestants believed that a political leader who acted immorally in private could still behave ethically in public. By 2016, that share had risen to 72%. The principle shifted when it became politically inconvenient.
At first, I hoped evangelical support for Trump would be temporary. Perhaps Christians would reluctantly vote for him and then spend four years challenging his conduct.
Instead, support deepened. According to a study of validated voters, Trump received 77% of the white evangelical Protestant vote in 2016 and 84% in 2020.
I watched Christians renegotiate theology around that alliance.
People who taught me to take every word of the Bible literally found qualifications whenever Scripture became inconvenient. The Bible repeatedly commanded care for immigrants and strangers. Jesus identified himself with the hungry, the sick, the poor, and the imprisoned. Paul said that in Christ there was neither Jew nor Greek.
Yet I heard Christians defend cruelty toward immigrants as necessary, treat poverty as a character defect, and speak of other nations as though God’s primary concern were preserving American comfort.
I watched the same thing happen to LGBTQ people, especially transgender people. Christians described humiliation as truth-telling and cruelty as courage. I heard people respond to the suffering and suicides among transgender people with some variation of “Oh well.”
The consequences were not imaginary. Research does not allow me to blame Christianity for every LGBTQ suicide, and affirming religious communities can provide genuine support. But a study of nearly three thousand LGBTQ young adults found that conflict between religious and sexual identities was associated with higher odds of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. That conflict carries a real human toll.
I kept asking how people indwelt by the Holy Spirit could look at that suffering and respond indifferently.
Not every Christian did. Many opposed Trump. Many welcomed immigrants, defended LGBTQ people, served the poor, and resisted the merger of Christianity with American power. Their presence prevented me from concluding that Christians were uniformly cruel, but it could not answer my question about the church as a whole.
The politics I was watching hardened into what researchers now call Christian nationalism: the fusion of Christian identity with national belonging and political authority. In PRRI’s 2024 survey, nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants were classified as Christian-nationalist adherents or sympathizers. The alliance had outlasted every claim that Trump was just a temporary compromise.
I realized that Christians negotiated their theology, too. Those who spoke most forcefully about biblical authority were no exception. When scripture conflicted with the pursuit of power, they found a new interpretation. When the character standard threatened their candidate, they changed the standard. When compassion complicated their politics, they labeled it a weakness.
Donald Trump did not cause me to stop believing. He merely revealed what I already suspected.
I could explain Christians' collective behavior without appealing to the Holy Spirit. Partisanship, fear, institutional self-preservation, and the ordinary human desire for power seemed sufficient.
This did not prove that God was absent. However, it removed one of my primary reasons for believing God was present.
And it created an even larger problem.
For me, the church had never been only evidence of God. The church had been part of my answer to the problem of evil. Christ entered into human suffering, and his people were supposed to continue his work by carrying God’s love into a broken world.
But what happened to that answer when the church behaved like every other institution? What happened when it contributed to suffering?
And then COVID happened.
The Father Who Did Not Intervene
For most of my life, I did not consider evil an argument against God. Christianity provided me with an explanation for it.
Human beings possessed free will. We used that freedom to harm one another and to corrupt the world God had created. God did not cause evil, but neither did he remain distant from it. He entered into human suffering through Jesus. On the cross, God experienced betrayal, torture, humiliation, abandonment, and death.
The resurrection promised that evil would not have the final word. Whatever happened in this life, suffering would be temporary. God would restore creation, resurrect the dead, judge those who caused harm, and wipe away every tear.
Until then, the church was expected to continue Christ’s work.
Christians fed the hungry, cared for the sick, protected the vulnerable, welcomed strangers, and confronted injustice. We prayed for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it was in heaven, and then we were supposed to act as though we meant it.
That was my answer to the problem of evil. God had entered into suffering, would eventually defeat it, and God’s people were already working against it.
The answer depended on the church.
Once I stopped seeing the church as meaningfully different from other institutions, the entire structure began to collapse. If Christians were not responding to evil with any power unavailable to the rest of the world, the church could no longer serve as evidence that God was healing anything.
Worse, the church sometimes caused the very suffering it claimed God had sent it to heal.
I do not mean that every Christian responded poorly to the pandemic. Many churches closed their buildings, moved services online, delivered food, helped people pay bills, and encouraged their members to protect one another. In May 2020, a majority of white evangelical Protestants still told Pew that local restrictions should remain in place or be tightened.
But Pew also found that white evangelicals were more likely than other religious groups to worry that restrictions would not be lifted quickly enough. Three-quarters rated Trump’s pandemic response positively.
As the pandemic continued, resistance grew louder.
I watched Christians treat masks as an act of submission, church closures as persecution, and public health measures as evidence of government tyranny. I heard people dismiss the deaths, saying many of the victims were elderly or already sick. I heard Christians argue that businesses had to reopen because the economy could not remain closed merely to protect vulnerable people.
Public officials made mistakes. Some rules were contradictory. Restrictions imposed real economic and psychological costs. Reasonable people could disagree about policies.
What I could not understand was how quickly Christians accepted preventable deaths as the price of economic activity.
These were people who had spent years telling me that the Canaanites deserved destruction for practicing human sacrifice. Then some of those same Christians were willing to place the elderly, the chronically ill, service workers, and the poor on the altar of the economy.
They did not call it human sacrifice, obviously. They called it freedom.
By September 2021, when I stood outside Whole Foods and realized I no longer believed in God, the United States had reported more than 650,000 COVID deaths. In a grimly biblical coincidence, the CDC recorded 666,000 deaths around the time I admitted that I no longer believed in God.
Vaccines were widely available by then, yet white evangelical Protestants were still less likely than other major religious groups to get vaccinated. In August 2021, Pew found that 57% of white evangelicals had received at least one dose, compared with 73% of white non-evangelical Protestants, 75% of religiously unaffiliated adults, and 82% of Catholics.
Those numbers did not prove Christianity false, but they intensified a question I could no longer avoid.
Where was the Holy Spirit?
If Christians possessed a divine source of love, wisdom, courage, and self-control, why did protecting others so often seem secondary to partisan identity? Why were atheists not only capable of the same compassion but sometimes more willing to accept inconvenience for the sake of strangers?
The pandemic also made the problem of evil feel personal again.
My father was diagnosed with cancer in 2020. He survived the cancer, but complications from surgery left him moving between hospitals and rehabilitation facilities. His health improved and deteriorated unpredictably. Some days, I did not know whether to prepare for him to die or for him to come home.
My relationship with the idea of God as Father had always been complicated by my relationship with my own father.
As a child, I often believed God hated me. When something went wrong, I assumed I had failed to believe hard enough, pray correctly, resist sin, or become whatever God expected me to be. In my mind, God did not merely judge me. He mocked my failure.
I eventually realized I had taken my father’s voice and put it in God’s mouth.
That realization helped me separate the two, but it created another problem. If God existed, he knew what was happening inside my head. He knew I had confused his voice with that of an angry, abusive parent. He knew where that confusion would eventually lead.
Why did he never correct it?
I was not demanding that God write a message across the sky. I did not necessarily need an angel, though Christianity had established that as an option. God supposedly knew me completely. He knew what evidence I needed and what would help me recognize his presence.
The threshold was not especially high.
Francis Schaeffer had insisted that God was there and not silent. Yet he wasn’t there. And he was silent.
The question grew beyond my own pain. I thought about children starving while Christians told me that God was a loving father. A human father who had food and watched his child starve would not be praised for respecting free will. He would be arrested.
God could send manna from heaven. According to the Bible, he had done so before.
And yet.
Free will could explain why one person chose to harm another. It could not explain every disease, natural disaster, birth defect, or dying child. Even when human choices contributed to suffering, an all-powerful God was not constrained by our failures. He could intervene.
What kind of father lets his child suffer when he has the power to stop it?
For most of my life, I supplied answers on God’s behalf. I explained why he permitted evil, why prayer seemed unanswered, why the church failed, and why divine action looked indistinguishable from ordinary events. Whenever the evidence seemed to accuse God, I served as his defense attorney.
Eventually, I stopped. I was just tired.
Fine, I thought. You fucking do it then.
Nothing happened. I’m still waiting for an answer.
COVID didn’t provide me with a philosophical proof that God was absent. My father’s illness did not logically disprove Christianity. No single tragedy accomplished that.
The Christian answer to suffering simply stopped being available to me. I no longer believed the church was bringing God’s healing into the world. I no longer believed suffering was temporary because I no longer knew whether the resurrection was real. I no longer believed a loving Father watched over creation.
My theodicy had collapsed. Once it did, I returned to the arguments that had made God seem necessary.
They no longer did.
When the Arguments Stopped Working
The arguments hadn’t changed. I had.
For most of my adult life, the contingency argument was the foundation of my belief in God. Everything around me existed, yet none of it had to. The universe appeared to be composed entirely of contingent things, each dependent on something else for its existence.
I believed that the chain could not continue forever. Eventually, something had to exist that did not depend on anything else. There had to be a necessary being that explained why anything existed at all.
That being was God.
The argument once seemed inescapable. Later, I recognized that it rested on a premise I had treated as obvious: every contingent reality must have a sufficient explanation for its existence.
Philosophers call this the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It remains a serious philosophical position, and many philosophers continue to defend it. But it is also among the most disputed premises in the cosmological argument. The argument works only if its central assumptions are true. It cannot establish those assumptions by producing a satisfying conclusion. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s discussion of the cosmological argument surveys both its major formulations and objections to those premises.
Once I stopped assuming that every contingent fact required the kind of explanation the argument demanded, God no longer followed as a logical necessity.
Even if the argument succeeded, another problem remained. A necessary foundation for reality is not automatically a person. It is certainly not automatically a loving person who inspired the Bible, became incarnate as Jesus, rose from the dead, and exists as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
I had filled that gap with additional arguments.
God must be maximal. A maximal God must be loving. An eternally loving God must have someone to love. Therefore, the Father eternally loved the Son through the Holy Spirit.
The reasoning was elegant within the system. It’s still rather poetic and an accomplishment of Greek philosophy (John of Damascus is a must-read).
But once I stepped outside it, I began to suspect that I had started with the Christian God and reasoned backward to him.
I also began trying to understand the science I had previously dismissed or forced into an apologetic framework. I watched lectures, read articles, and tried to catch up on subjects I had spent years either denying or treating as mechanisms that still required God to do the real explanatory work.
Quantum physics did not prove that the universe came from nothing. The “nothing” described in popular science rarely corresponds to the philosophical nothing discussed by theologians, and no theory has eliminated all metaphysical questions about why reality exists.
But physics revealed how much my arguments relied on applying ordinary human intuitions about causes to conditions unlike anything humans typically encounter. Proposals such as the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary model did not disprove God. They showed that cosmologists could describe the universe’s earliest state without treating it as an ordinary object beginning within a preexisting clock.
A natural explanation did not establish atheism. It simply meant that this particular explanation no longer required God.
The same change occurred when I considered morality.
I had believed that objective morality required God. Without a divine lawgiver, moral judgments seemed to collapse into mere preference. I might dislike murder, exploitation, or cruelty, but I could not call them objectively wrong unless goodness existed beyond human opinion.
Then I began reading about the evolution of cooperation, empathy, fairness, and social norms. Researchers offered naturalistic accounts of how moral behavior could arise among social animals and develop through human culture. Work on the origins of human cooperation and morality, for example, describes morality as emerging from sympathy, cooperation, and the formation of shared norms.
That research did not prove that objective moral truths do not exist. It did show that human moral experience did not necessarily require a divine lawgiver.
I could explain why we cared about one another without first assuming that God had placed that concern within us.
The same was true of meaning, love, consciousness, and religious experience. Natural explanations were incomplete. They still are. But incompleteness is not evidence that the missing answer must be God.
I had spent years treating every unanswered question as a space reserved for him. As those spaces grew smaller, I began asking why I believed God belonged there at all.
I returned to the resurrection arguments, the fine-tuning argument, the moral argument, intelligent design, and the philosophical work that once gave my faith an intellectual foundation. I still understood the arguments and could probably have presented some of them as persuasively as many seasoned apologists.
But they no longer persuaded me.
I do not want to turn this essay into a line-by-line refutation of Christian apologetics. Others have written those books, and Christians have written responses to them. Responses have been written to those responses. I’ve spent enough of my life in that conversation to know it never ends.
The problem was not that I discovered one unanswerable objection. I discovered that apologetics made the most sense only after I accepted its underlying picture of reality. Once I stopped assuming Christianity was true, many of its arguments seemed capable of defending belief but not of establishing it.
That’s an important difference.
A person who already believes may reasonably find the cosmological argument consistent with that belief. Someone who has experienced God may interpret that experience as evidence of God’s presence. Someone who trusts the Gospels may find the resurrection historically persuasive.
But none of those arguments forced me from the possibility of some transcendent reality to the conclusion that Christianity is true.
There is no silver bullet against God. There still isn’t.
I do not find the arguments for God conclusive, nor do I find the arguments against God conclusive. That is why the certainty of my parking-lot declaration eventually gave way to agnosticism. I cannot honestly claim to know whether God exists.
I can only say that I no longer believe God exists. That realization has carried a cost beyond theology.
Before entering ministry, I had considered becoming a lawyer. Instead, people told me that God had given me a mind for apologetics. I believed them. I pursued that calling, attended Christian colleges and seminaries, read hundreds of books, and structured my education to defend a faith I assumed would remain with me for the rest of my life.
No one physically forced me to make those decisions. I made them in faith.
But I made them within a religious world where calling meant obedience. If God had designed me for apologetics, pursuing another life wouldn't have been merely a different career choice. It would have meant resisting God’s purpose for me.
By the time the arguments failed, I had built much of my life around them.
That was part of what I mourned in the Whole Foods parking lot. I had not just lost an explanation for the universe. I had lost the explanation for what I had done with my life.
I could not recover those years by forcing myself to believe again.
Perhaps I could reconstruct some form of Christianity someday. It would not surprise me. But it would require more than reassembling the same arguments and pretending they still carried the weight they once did.
By the time I admitted I no longer believed, deconstruction had already done its work. I had examined the structure and found that Christianity could no longer carry the weight I had placed on it. Deconversion was simply the moment I stopped pretending otherwise.
That left one final question.
What was left?
What’s Left
When Christianity collapsed, I expected everything else to follow suit. It didn’t. I still cared whether something was true. Suffering still mattered. Cruelty remained cruel. Love remained good.
Christianity had given me language for many of those convictions, but it did not own them. They did not disappear when my belief did.
In some ways, they became more urgent.
I could no longer assume that God would eventually repair what human beings had broken. I could no longer postpone justice to the next life or trust that suffering would someday be revealed as part of a larger plan. If anyone was going to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, protect the vulnerable, or sit with the grieving, it would have to be people.
It would have to be us.
That does not mean I now regard all aspects of Christianity as harmful or fraudulent. I refuse to rewrite my entire past simply because I interpret it differently now.
The church was sometimes a refuge during a frightening childhood. People within it loved me when they had no obligation to. Men showed me kindness and stability I didn't always find elsewhere. A MercyMe song once reached a lonely teenager sitting by a lake at Windermere. That happened. Its significance does not vanish just because I no longer believe God arranged it.
Beauty does not become counterfeit merely because I’ve changed my explanation of it.
Neither do the injuries disappear.
I still carry the effects of churches that confused authority with control, certainty with faithfulness, and institutional survival with the will of God. I carry the years spent trying to become the person religious authorities said God had designed me to be. I carry the reflex to distrust my own judgment whenever it conflicts with someone who claims to speak for God.
Leaving Christianity didn’t erase those reflexes. It allowed me to recognize them for what they are.
It also changed how I think about forgiveness.
I still believe mercy matters. I no longer believe forgiveness can be demanded of an injured person on God’s behalf. It is not a debt the wounded owe those who harmed them. Reconciliation may be beautiful when possible, but it cannot be bought by asking victims to pretend the injury no longer matters.
Some things must be named before they can be released. Some relationships cannot be repaired. Sometimes the most truthful thing a person can say is that what happened was wrong and should never have happened.
Some might call that bitterness.
I’ll call it honesty.
I also continue to study Christianity.
I still read the Bible. I still study the historical Jesus, the development of Christian doctrine, and the religious worlds from which Christianity emerged. Part of that may be habit. Part of it is the lingering suspicion that I could be wrong. Part of it is simply that these texts and ideas shaped me too deeply to become irrelevant the moment I stopped believing them.
But I read them differently now.
I no longer search for arguments to defend a predetermined conclusion. I can allow the biblical texts to disagree with one another. I can acknowledge the political interests, historical circumstances, and human personalities behind them. I can find something wise without declaring it inerrant or something beautiful without insisting that God wrote it.
For the first time, I can let questions remain unresolved.
Depending on the question, both “atheist” and “agnostic” describe me. I am an atheist in the ordinary sense that I do not presently believe in God. I am agnostic in the stricter sense that I do not claim to know that no God exists.
I do not know.
That answer once seemed cowardly. The Christianity I knew had trained me to believe that the most consequential questions required certainty. Eternal destinies supposedly depended on getting them right.
Now, “I don’t know” feels like one of the most honest things I can say.
Perhaps belief in God was never something an argument could compel. Perhaps it is closer to falling in love. Reasons may make it possible, and experience may make it understandable. But no syllogism can manufacture it.
I cannot force myself to believe because belief once gave my life coherence. I cannot rebuild Christianity from nostalgia or fear. If belief ever returns, it will have to be something other than the performance of certainty.
Until then, reconstruction does not mean replacing Christianity with another system that answers every question. It means learning to live without insisting that every question be answered.
I cannot recover the years I devoted to a calling I no longer believe was from God. I can decide what those years become. They taught me to read, argue, question, teach, and recognize how institutions protect themselves. They gave me friendships, memories, and language I will likely carry for the rest of my life.
None of that requires me to pretend the loss was necessary or that everything happened for a reason.
Some things happened because people made choices. Some things were lost. Some wounds do not become blessings merely because we survive them.
I can choose work because it matters to me, not because I believe God assigned it. I can love people without treating them as projects. I can pursue truth without needing to confirm what I already believe. I can extend mercy without surrendering my right to name harm. I can build a life without first proving that the universe intended me to exist.
In the Whole Foods parking lot, I looked up at the sky and realized I no longer believed anyone was behind it.
The sky remained beautiful. It didn’t need to be a message for its beauty to be real. Perhaps God was there, watching me. Perhaps not.
I still don’t know.
For the first time, I am no longer afraid of leaving that sentence unfinished.
(Dialogue from childhood and early adulthood has been reconstructed from memory.)