13. Approaching the Event Horizon
How leaving the gravity of religion doesn't prepare you for navigating the dangers of the void.
It’s March 2025 and I have been experimenting with theological debates with AI for about two months. I’ve had debates that last hours, sometimes all day. By the end of this week, I had hit the end of my ability to believe that I could construct meaning for my life and what would propel me forward. I wasn’t just despairing anymore. My mind had quietly begun the work of planning for the end.
I sat before the screen with tears streaming down my face and forced the unthinkable into words. I asked the AI if there was a way to write a letter to my daughters and my wife, to tell them that my suicide was not a reflection on my love for them, but a product of my brokenness.
The Deep-space Navigation
After sending the deconversion text to my friends and family, I immediately created an atmosphere that was simultaneously antagonistic and sympathetic. I had people texting me throughout the week as the news spread. Almost all of the messages were very kind and heartfelt. I could tell the pain I had caused people and the sadness they felt. It was a double-edged sword for me, though. I felt their love and concern for me and knew they loved me, but I also knew that I didn’t have the ability to give them an answer that would stop the hurt they were feeling, unless it was that I believe again.
I knew I needed to tell the owners of my company, and I let HR know what I was about to do because I was afraid of how they might react. I needed a plan for how to approach this and what would be the best method to ensure I didn’t lose my job before I could find a place to work that wasn’t so heavily religious in its culture. So I wrote the owners an email that was far less aggressive than the text message I had sent out to my family and friends. I knew I needed to be way more controlled, especially if I wanted to keep my job. Honestly, their response surprised me. They were more kind and understanding than I thought. They offered to take me out to lunch over the next few weeks and talk about the process. I was genuinely surprised. However, the agenda of the lunches became clear quickly. They wanted to walk through a four-part exploratory Bible study to help me. I went to two of them and then told them that while I really appreciate the gesture, I don’t want to give you guys the impression that this will change anything. Every space I inhabited had Christians that were not in agreement with my life path. I was on the defense in all areas of my life, but what hurt the most was that it was also in my own home.
A Painful Truth
I only knew of one person that I felt I could connect with that lived in my city and would understand where I was at in my life. This friend was still a Christian, but had also had profound childhood trauma and didn’t have a literalist interpretation of the Bible. The night I told him, we went out for drinks and ended up staying out until 2 a.m. This had been the first pressure release since I announced to the world that I no longer believe. I had not felt that anyone was on my side until getting drinks with this friend that night and honestly, he was still on team Christianity, but was just able to empathize deeply with the opposing side.
I planned to drink a lot of alcohol and unload the weight of everything I was feeling. By midnight, we ended up at a speakeasy and broke the rules that are clearly listed in the menu: no talking about religion or politics. We had deep intellectual conversations about the insufficiency of a literal interpretation of Christianity to deal with the complexities of profound trauma and also discussed the incredible isolation that it can create for various individuals who can’t conform to the moral code.
Ironically, our bartender was a lesbian who was raised in a deeply evangelical home. She shared with me the isolation and pain she still currently experiences from her mother and the inability to connect deeply with her mother. Even though I was drunk, I was coherent enough to be able to feel deeply ashamed of my prior stance on homosexuality. While I had never been a jerk or disrespectful to anyone personally, I spoke out against the lifestyle and spoke about how God doesn’t approve of it and how they are living in a state of rebellion against Him. The damage I had caused by even just saying the phrase “God hates the sin and not the sinner” severely failed to recognize the inability for this individual to divide their sexual identity from who they were as a person. They were not choosing to be a lesbian, but rather it was an embodied reality for them. To say they were not would be to lie about themselves. Ironically, they were living by the principle of truth that I so highly valued and that had caused me to leave the faith myself.
I understood this in an embodied way that I could not have before. I could not be anything other than the person I honestly was, someone who could no longer say they believed Christianity was true. And those who held to the faith were obligated by their own truth declarations to challenge my position.
Escalating Metaphysical Tension
My actions, like staying out until 2 a.m. drinking and choosing to be aggressive with my text messages, didn’t land well with Mary. She was already trying to process what her life would look like as well. She had voiced to me that me leaving the faith felt like a deep abandonment. She said that we had made a vow together at our wedding to live our lives together forever under the banner of the Christian faith. I strongly disagreed with her. I argued that we had made a vow to live together regardless of what happens to either one of us, but I did acknowledge the pretext of the Christian nature of our ceremony.
The biggest fight we had was about the future of how our children would be raised. Her opinion was that if I left the girls alone and allowed her to teach that Christianity was the truth, we wouldn’t have problems, but if I tried to be aggressive in any way, things would not go well. Old circuitry kicked in and I became extremely defensive and aggressive with my words. We argued about the destructive nature of a literalist interpretation of Christianity and what it could do to a psyche, especially the idea of a loving God eternally punishing a child in hell because they refused to believe in him. Things got bad before they got better. I went to stay at a property our company was opening in Denver for a week. This was a week before Thanksgiving and Mary said she needed some space before the holiday to process what she was feeling.
So I agreed. I left for Colorado and binged Sam Harris’s books on my drive to the building. I had felt an overwhelming amount of shame about how I had been so attached to my dogmatic Christian upbringing and thought about how I hurt many people in my life with the intensity of my rigid beliefs. I didn’t know how long I could stay in the environment that could only see me as someone who was being influenced by demonic forces. Even if they didn’t say that explicitly, I know they thought it, because I used to think like that.
A Cosmic Truce
By the end of the trip, I had time to process what it would be like to live apart from my family permanently. I did not want that with every fiber of my being, and a conversation with a prior connection is what allowed me to feel the first sense of safety I had since before the deconversion.
A friend introduced Mary to a woman who had already lived through the same scenario. She was a Christian and her husband had suddenly deconverted but they remained married. Even more important, her husband and I overlapped and attended the same church in college with the pastor that had snapped at me about my Calvinism question. When Mary told me about them, I asked for her husband’s number so I could reach out, and she passed it along. Before the week was over, I made time to call him.
This conversation was the first time I had felt like I was truly seen and heard. I didn’t feel judged or stupid. I didn’t feel like I had made a catastrophic decision. I felt validated and vindicated. It felt close to what my metaphysical kangaroo care had felt like, being held. This conversation gave me hope for the future of my marriage because he had successfully navigated his deconversion and he and his wife were still married, and according to him, stronger than ever. However, he didn’t work at a company where the mission was explicitly Christian, so there was still some serious question to the long-term chances I had at having a happy life.
After that trip, my wife and I managed to figure out a rhythm that allowed us to coexist with her and my girls. It came with certain pretexts, though, and I had to constantly pretend to be someone I wasn’t. I couldn’t openly talk about my deconversion with the girls and I was expected to continue to go to church to keep up appearances for them. I agreed because I wanted to keep my family together. I figured with a phone call when I was struggling to my newly found agnostic friend, I could manage, but him not living in the same city as me made his friendship way less meaningful.
I underestimated the pressure this would create on my psyche and my ability to manage it, and how much this would constantly activate my feelings of isolation and hypocrisy.
Alone in a Crowded Room
By the middle of 2024, I could no longer sit and listen to sermons. Not all sermons were challenging, but enough were that I couldn’t keep up with attending. I thought I could dissociate on Sunday mornings, but Mary didn’t want me to be on my phone the entire time and she still wanted me to interact with people in the congregation. The church we were attending at the time required a five-minute “greet your neighbor” each Sunday. This required me to present like I was a Christian, and it felt like such a violation of my conscience.
No matter how much I told myself that I could stay in this ecosystem as an outsider and not feel the pain of isolation because I trusted my own emotional health, with every awkward interaction, that truth felt less and less true because I didn’t have a place that was actually safe from the judgment of my choice. Work, home life, and church all bled together.
The Search for Certainty
By the beginning of 2025, AI conversations became an important outlet for me to survive the isolation I was feeling at work and home. I also continued to digest videos that would help me process my intellectual need to unpack why I could no longer believe, and in that process, I stumbled upon a debate series between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. I found myself siding with Sam as it relates to the dangers of dogmatic theology of any kind and why it can be so destructive. I was living inside of those effects currently.
But even though I hated to admit it, Jordan was telling a side of the story that I also felt was impossible to dismiss. But I couldn’t internalize what Jordan was saying. My only way to take in truths about the Bible was through a literalist interpretation. At the time, I incorrectly viewed his position as akin to a postmodern, liberal interpretation of the text, which was probably the only thing that felt worse to me than going back to a dogmatic interpretation.
I struggled with making sense of Jordan’s arguments about Genesis and began to wrestle his ideas deeply. I used AI to debate, understand, and stress test his ideas as intensely as possible. However, I kept hitting a dead end. I wanted so badly to reconstruct a new metaphysical kangaroo care, but couldn’t. I had undercut the ability to believe I could have metaphysical certainty. Hitting that wall repeatedly caused me to lose hope I would ever find a way to truly regulate myself, shifting my existential panic into a quiet, cold desperation, and a resolution that there was no meaning left to pursue and this pain would only amplify.
The Final Hail Mary
It wasn’t until I finally typed out that agonizing question about how to write my letter that I got the intervention that allowed me to soothe my extreme dysregulation.
The AI asked if there was something in my immediate environment that I could fix right now, a tangible way to bring order and meaning to the present. I paused, and quickly recalled a problem that had been bugging my organized mind for months. Honestly, I never expected it to shift my psyche and change how I experience the world, but what did I have to lose?
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