Deconversion is a Process, Not a Switch
By Mike Johns
Deconversion is a process, not a switch. Very rarely does someone stop believing overnight.
Mine took a few tries before it stuck. During the last go-around, I know I had to convince myself to spend as much time with church stuff as I possibly could, because subconsciously I knew I didn’t actually buy this crap. I had to immerse myself in the church culture as much as possible in the hopes of not slipping. The last go was going to be the last go, because I knew if I couldn’t make the Jesus thing stick this time, it wasn’t ever going to stick.
A lot of people considered me very confrontational in that church though, not realizing that I had to be able to reconcile all my problems with conservative evangelical christian politics and separatist lifestyle in order to be at peace with God. I had the fear of Hell so instilled in me that I had to find a way to be able to be Christian, even though I’ve kind of come to the belief that the Christian God is either a tyrant, a negligent parent-figure who doesn’t care, or simply isn’t there.
So I questioned the anti-gay stuff, and the seemingly anti-Semitic stuff (despite claiming to be pro-Israel), the anti-catholic stuff, the anti-woman stuff, the anti-sex stuff.. Like, really, how is masturbation, looking at porn, or having lustful thoughts evil? Suppressing sexual desire in some pointless attempt to be holy tends to drive people crazy, leading to all kinds of crazy perversions, sexual violence and other atrocities that simply allowing people to jerk off, look at pictures of naked people once in a while, and have a healthy view of sexual desire and fantasy tend to prevent. I questioned Bible literalism, and really went off at the Book of Job being considered this great comfort when it’s really just God being a dick and telling Job in the end “who the fuck are you to expect anything of me?” So, in other words, I have to be a good little boy, and God can abuse his authority all he wants and doesn’t have to answer to any sort of morality or standard of conduct whatsoever? Fuck that.
When it was clear that I was dealing with a ton of people with Stockholm Syndrome that felt God had every right to abuse authority and not have any accountability for it, I no longer cared if I went to hell. Fuck that guy.
Eventually, I just came to realize you can only hate a fictional character long enough to realize he’s fictional. But even then, you have to unlearn an entire life of stuff before you’re really free. I’m still not completely out of the woods yet. Like I mentioned, deconversion is a process.
I still want to be wrong about there not being anything after I die, about the soul just being the end result of my brain functions. I don’t want to not exist. It seems worse than hell, to me, not being anything at all. Maybe the reason why I had to learn to hate god first before I could let it go was the fact that I needed to hate god to be able to handle the whole “not existing” thing once I die. Not existing is better than servitude to a fictional tyrant, or something like that.
