For myself one of my greatest regrets and shame is telling my teenage daughter that I was so upset that I wouldn’t see her in heaven because she had rejected the faith. I am so so sorry I did that to her, but we survived. She told me later that she spent two decades anxious that she’d not be in heaven even though logically she had moved away from that belief.
Evangelicalism does that to you. When we were in there, it was impossible to think differently.
I’m now in a liberal Anglo Catholic Church, my husband and the rest of the family no longer belong anywhere.
I don’t think we can know anything about God, but we can know about love and follow the example of a man who showed what that looked like. That’s good enough for me. I don’t give an afterlife a second thought. It all seems part of a ‘preserve me’ complex.
Thank you for sharing your own vulnerable story around this. I know how hard it is to talk about these things publicly and it means a lot to me that you did.
I can imagine the regret you named is a hard thing to sit with still. You were frightened for her. That distinction matters and is what I try to hold when my friends, who are still mostly evangelicals, still want me to change my beliefs. I know they love me. They can't help but operate from where they stand.
What I'm trying to do with my writing is help people see that love expressed that way still causes real pain, even when pain is the last thing intended. And I'm grateful you shared, because you've been on both sides of it and understand it deeply.
I also agree about the struggle to assert that we can truly know anything about God. To me, the incarnation, if true, is one of the most beautiful ideas. God choosing to enter his own creation by taking on human flesh and doing the thing all humans need, intentional presence. I'm getting wrecked by it emotionally and I don't even assert it as literally true. Just the hypothetical of it being true is powerful enough to change how I see the world.
Trevor, before I finish your article, I need to stop reading it and reach out to you.
I first want to extend to you my deepest gratitude and appreciation for your having taken the time and courage to write this. I am very grateful I came across it.
I feel as if over the past 24 hours, I have come to know you a bit more, and it’s for that reason a perfect stranger will express what I’m about to say to you here. I am bypassing the stranger dynamic entirely, just so you know the spirit in which these words are coming from.
As a forever growing and learning Christian (23 years and running), I am expending in my life every effort I can to love everyone, including those who are difficult to love. As I read your story, I can only feel a deep sense of camaraderie and love for you, your journey, and the pain you have endured throughout your life.
While I do not profess to know anything more about you than what you have conveyed in your article so far, I can only imagine the internal struggles you have/are dealing with.
The manner in which you describe the unconditional nature of your daughter's love for virtually everything in the world, is extremely endearing. While it is very likely a moot point to even highlight this to you, she unquestionably inherited that trait from her mother, and most assuredly from YOU. For that reason, you have every reason to be beaming with pride and love when you see her doing something wonderful like relocating a snail to safer ground.
The correlation you drew between the absentee relationship with your father and how you view your relationship with God is undeniably clear and understandable.
I was raised in a home that was essentially devoid of any theological structure other than what my father kept privately to himself. My mom always believed she was living her hell on earth. Quite the pessimistic approach with no desires to even dig deeper to find out who He might be in her life. Her view, at times, gave me a skewed perspective of how my own presence might have influenced her opinion. I have long since removed that pressure from myself.
I did have two very loving parents who did the best they could, but my deep and profound relationship with Jesus Christ has been entirely born from decades of intense pain, loss, and discoveries I had to make on my own.
Before I leave this to get ready for work, I am very much looking forward to diving deeper into your article. Just from the first few paragraphs, I found myself deeply resonating with your story if only from the perspective of our interactions yesterday on my post.
I leave you for now with this. I have a very strong conviction that tells me you are far closer to God's bosom than you consciously allow yourself to believe. And in some way, I think you already know this. I also believe God pains deeply for what hurt, and hurts you. He has no intention whatsoever of letting you go or out of His sights no matter where He may fit into your world and mind at the present time.
I pray this message has not been too presumptuous of me. It's what my heart is telling me as I dive deeper into your article. I am looking forward to reading more.
I loved that you stopped reading in the middle of my article to write to me. What you did is in many ways exactly what I hope people take from my writing.
You didn't wait until you had a response assembled. You turned toward a stranger while you were still in the middle of it.
Thank you for what you said about my daughter. It is a sweet thought, and I hadn't slowed down enough to see it that way. I'm thankful for how you articulated it.
I'm sorry about your mom, and about the version of God her despair handed you before you had a chance to meet him on your own terms. You're right that I carry a corrupted picture too. I built mine out of my father's absence and carried it for thirty years. But he wasn't entirely absent. When he was present, he was a genuinely lovely and kind man. He was also an addict who struggled with what he had inherited from his own father.
What I came to understand as I got older is how complicated people are, and how much we take on from our families that corrupts our ability to see clearly. But my leaving the Christian faith happened because I could no longer make the definition of a perfectly loving father fit what I experienced in my childhood, if he really was all-powerful. It isn't that I don't understand the arguments about free will, or the theological reasons suffering is permitted. It's that they fall flat on the emotional child still in me who screams, "Dad, you could have stopped it. Why did you let this happen to me?"
That boy will never get his answer in the moment he needed it. I still carry him. He is afraid of the idea of a Father, and untrusting of it, because the only one he knew wasn't safe, and because at nine he screamed out in prayer for God the Father to stop my father, and nothing came.
A couple of years after my faith came apart, the people who helped me soften toward God again were not the ones with the best answers. They were evangelical friends who sat up with me past two in the morning and never once made their staying conditional on my coming back. One of them could hold his own convictions and the full weight of mine in the same room without needing to resolve the difference. I had not known that was possible. It did more for me than every argument anyone made.
That is what I keep finding in the gospels. Jesus touches the leper before he says a word about healing. He doesn't ask the paralytic to affirm anything first. At the well, the offer comes before the change, and the revelation of who he is comes last. He seems almost uninterested in making recognition the price of his presence. If God wanted to save the world by argument, thirty years of ordinary presence and three years of tables and touch is a strange way to go about it. Which makes me wonder whether the incarnation is the delivery system for the message or whether it is the message.
And this is where I land, for whatever it's worth from someone in my position. Jesus says eternal life is to know God. Present tense. Not a location you arrive at afterward. If that's right, then presence isn't the preliminary to eternal life. It's a taste of the thing itself. Every time someone stays in the room with a person they can't fix, something of that gets enacted here. I think this is the most lovely thing about the story of the incarnation.
I can't assert the metaphysics. I won't pretend otherwise with anyone. But you gave me a piece of it this morning by writing before you'd finished reading, and I wanted you to know it landed.
I like what you said about my being closer to God than I realize. In many ways I feel that. I just can't assert it the way I once did, because if I did, I'd be right back where I was before I left. So I hold the story of Jesus loosely and say I hope it's true, without claiming that it is.
Thank you for writing this because I know it took a lot for you to do so.
I am clapping for you and telling you to keep writing it out and talking about it aloud when you are ready. Decision by decision, it helps you release what you have carried and learn how to sit with it.
There are so many concepts of God and so many faiths. Sometimes I wonder why we cannot simply say, “We are believers,” instead of immediately separating ourselves as Catholic, Muslim, atheist, Christian, or something else.
Those labels can make people feel as though they must choose a side before they have had the freedom to discover what they are truly seeking.
I want to share something with the twelve-year-old you that I once shared with my brother after we lost our mother when he was thirteen:
“It is okay to let it all out. It is okay not to know. Is God there? I dare you to find out and tell me when you do. I can lead you toward what I know, but what is far more profound is when you discover a truth greater than anything another person in this world could tell you.”
Everyone I know who has a deep relationship with God, not merely religion, has had some version of the fight you are having now. The journey away, the questioning, and sometimes the return with new eyes can change everything.
And there are always people who will listen to you without needing you to reach the same conclusion they have.
Food for thought: sometimes religion becomes the barrier between a person and their relationship with God. Other paths can shatter what was built around that relationship and make the way forward feel much clearer.
I do not know what that path is for you. But I believe that if you are willing to go down the rabbit hole honestly, something within you will recognize the truth and say, “Right here.”
Thanks for your thoughtful words, Cora. Thanks for sharing vulnerably about your own life and the words you shared with your brother after your own painful loss.
I am hopeful about this journey I'm on now, but it definitely has a different feel than the one I was on when I was certain about the divine. I mostly sit in a place of kind reflection on my past religious experience and seek to understand the deeper meaning underneath the religious text, holding it with honest curiosity instead of as a rigid safety net.
But I know that for many people, including the version of myself ten years ago, doing that, and arguing that a person can do that, would have been destabilizing to my own sense of self, because of how much of my identity was supported by the belief that it was the only truth in the world I could be sure of.
So this process of writing is me trying my best to honor that scared twelve-year-old while being kind to the people around me who are also carrying something real when they encounter my work. As you saw in the article, and as I mentioned to you, the struggle is still happening, and I'm definitely still having to be kind to myself and ask for forgiveness when I let the scared child version of myself drive.
And honestly, had I just been soft and allowed myself to cry and sit with that young boy, I could have saved myself a lot of grief and pain between me and my wife. This article is my way of reminding myself to choose that instead of the anger and aggression.
That's what you mean when you say there are always people who will listen without needing you to reach the same conclusion they have. Thank you for being one of them.
Thank you for this incredibly honest (and well written) chapter / article. Your drive to be honest, and seek the truth at what can feel like great risks is SO inspiring. In my Faith there is a quote I love -- "Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues." I believe that speaking what's true for us, heals us and leads us to the whole truth. And in that process all other virtues -- like the ones you write about with such conviction and passion -- can grow in healthy ways, virtues like courage, and faith, and forgiveness, and grace, and love, and beauty, and mercy... Thank you for writing and for digging so deep. Your journey is powerful, and liberating, and courageous -- and will inspire so many people seeking more honest relationships with themselves, with others, and with God.
Thanks for your kind words Bruce. Honesty for me feels like the only concrete thing I truly possess in my life. After losing touch with the metaphysical certainty, all I have left to be sure about how I'm feeling and what my life looks like. Much of the faith still feels incredibly relevant to me and at the same time it is so painful. I'm thankful for people like you in my life that model a love and appreciation for spirituality and at the same time can hold space for being unsure and still have tremendous curiosity. I'm glad to have you in my life 😁
Trevor, I appreciate the honesty and vulnerability it takes to write openly about something as weighty as the fear of hell. This is not merely an abstract theological question when someone has spent years believing that eternity is at stake. I can understand why those questions would remain emotionally significant even after your beliefs have changed.
As a believer in Christ, however, I approach hell differently than seeing it primarily as a doctrine intended to frighten people into religious obedience. Scripture presents God as holy and just, humanity as genuinely accountable for sin, and judgment as real. But the Christian message does not end with judgment. At the center of the gospel is what God has done to save sinners through Jesus Christ.
That distinction matters to me. Christianity is not ultimately “behave correctly or God will send you to hell.” None of us can make ourselves righteous enough before a holy God. The gospel is that Christ lived the righteous life we could not live, bore the judgment sinners deserve, died, and rose again. Salvation is received by grace through faith in Him, not earned through fear-driven religious performance.
I also appreciate your willingness to examine difficult questions rather than pretending they do not exist. I would only encourage anyone wrestling with this subject to examine Christ Himself and the claims of Scripture carefully, rather than evaluating Christianity solely through painful religious experiences or imperfect representations of it. If Christianity is true, then the answer to our fear of judgment is ultimately not denial of judgment, but refuge in Christ.
Thank you for sharing something this personal, Trevor. Even though we may arrive at different conclusions, I appreciate the opportunity to understand your perspective and engage with it respectfully.
Thank you for reading it carefully and for the kindness in how you wrote.
I want to clarify,, because you may have read my reason for leaving as smaller than it was. I did not leave because I was hurt by Christians or because I encountered a bad representation of the faith. I spent twenty years inside it, studied systematic theology and biblical theology, and taught the atonement you just described to other people. I know the difference between grace and religious performance. I preached it.
I left because of a problem I could not resolve. If God is a father who loves me the way I love my daughters, and if he has all power, then he watched what happened in my house when I was nine and did nothing. I screamed for him out loud, once, while my father put his head through a wall, and the answer was silence. Every theodicy I know, and I know most of them, answers that intellectually and does not touch it.
I would also gently push back on the last line. I am not denying judgment in order to feel better. If that were what I was doing, I would have picked a version of it that hurt less. The essay you read is about a man who no longer believes in hell and is still afraid of it. That is not denial. That is what it looks like when the fear outlives the belief.
But I appreciate you engaging with it rather than around it. Most people do not.
Thank you Trevor.
For myself one of my greatest regrets and shame is telling my teenage daughter that I was so upset that I wouldn’t see her in heaven because she had rejected the faith. I am so so sorry I did that to her, but we survived. She told me later that she spent two decades anxious that she’d not be in heaven even though logically she had moved away from that belief.
Evangelicalism does that to you. When we were in there, it was impossible to think differently.
I’m now in a liberal Anglo Catholic Church, my husband and the rest of the family no longer belong anywhere.
I don’t think we can know anything about God, but we can know about love and follow the example of a man who showed what that looked like. That’s good enough for me. I don’t give an afterlife a second thought. It all seems part of a ‘preserve me’ complex.
Margaret,
Thank you for sharing your own vulnerable story around this. I know how hard it is to talk about these things publicly and it means a lot to me that you did.
I can imagine the regret you named is a hard thing to sit with still. You were frightened for her. That distinction matters and is what I try to hold when my friends, who are still mostly evangelicals, still want me to change my beliefs. I know they love me. They can't help but operate from where they stand.
What I'm trying to do with my writing is help people see that love expressed that way still causes real pain, even when pain is the last thing intended. And I'm grateful you shared, because you've been on both sides of it and understand it deeply.
I also agree about the struggle to assert that we can truly know anything about God. To me, the incarnation, if true, is one of the most beautiful ideas. God choosing to enter his own creation by taking on human flesh and doing the thing all humans need, intentional presence. I'm getting wrecked by it emotionally and I don't even assert it as literally true. Just the hypothetical of it being true is powerful enough to change how I see the world.
Glad to connect.
Trevor, before I finish your article, I need to stop reading it and reach out to you.
I first want to extend to you my deepest gratitude and appreciation for your having taken the time and courage to write this. I am very grateful I came across it.
I feel as if over the past 24 hours, I have come to know you a bit more, and it’s for that reason a perfect stranger will express what I’m about to say to you here. I am bypassing the stranger dynamic entirely, just so you know the spirit in which these words are coming from.
As a forever growing and learning Christian (23 years and running), I am expending in my life every effort I can to love everyone, including those who are difficult to love. As I read your story, I can only feel a deep sense of camaraderie and love for you, your journey, and the pain you have endured throughout your life.
While I do not profess to know anything more about you than what you have conveyed in your article so far, I can only imagine the internal struggles you have/are dealing with.
The manner in which you describe the unconditional nature of your daughter's love for virtually everything in the world, is extremely endearing. While it is very likely a moot point to even highlight this to you, she unquestionably inherited that trait from her mother, and most assuredly from YOU. For that reason, you have every reason to be beaming with pride and love when you see her doing something wonderful like relocating a snail to safer ground.
The correlation you drew between the absentee relationship with your father and how you view your relationship with God is undeniably clear and understandable.
I was raised in a home that was essentially devoid of any theological structure other than what my father kept privately to himself. My mom always believed she was living her hell on earth. Quite the pessimistic approach with no desires to even dig deeper to find out who He might be in her life. Her view, at times, gave me a skewed perspective of how my own presence might have influenced her opinion. I have long since removed that pressure from myself.
I did have two very loving parents who did the best they could, but my deep and profound relationship with Jesus Christ has been entirely born from decades of intense pain, loss, and discoveries I had to make on my own.
Before I leave this to get ready for work, I am very much looking forward to diving deeper into your article. Just from the first few paragraphs, I found myself deeply resonating with your story if only from the perspective of our interactions yesterday on my post.
I leave you for now with this. I have a very strong conviction that tells me you are far closer to God's bosom than you consciously allow yourself to believe. And in some way, I think you already know this. I also believe God pains deeply for what hurt, and hurts you. He has no intention whatsoever of letting you go or out of His sights no matter where He may fit into your world and mind at the present time.
I pray this message has not been too presumptuous of me. It's what my heart is telling me as I dive deeper into your article. I am looking forward to reading more.
I wish you a truly peaceful day my friend.
John,
I loved that you stopped reading in the middle of my article to write to me. What you did is in many ways exactly what I hope people take from my writing.
You didn't wait until you had a response assembled. You turned toward a stranger while you were still in the middle of it.
Thank you for what you said about my daughter. It is a sweet thought, and I hadn't slowed down enough to see it that way. I'm thankful for how you articulated it.
I'm sorry about your mom, and about the version of God her despair handed you before you had a chance to meet him on your own terms. You're right that I carry a corrupted picture too. I built mine out of my father's absence and carried it for thirty years. But he wasn't entirely absent. When he was present, he was a genuinely lovely and kind man. He was also an addict who struggled with what he had inherited from his own father.
What I came to understand as I got older is how complicated people are, and how much we take on from our families that corrupts our ability to see clearly. But my leaving the Christian faith happened because I could no longer make the definition of a perfectly loving father fit what I experienced in my childhood, if he really was all-powerful. It isn't that I don't understand the arguments about free will, or the theological reasons suffering is permitted. It's that they fall flat on the emotional child still in me who screams, "Dad, you could have stopped it. Why did you let this happen to me?"
That boy will never get his answer in the moment he needed it. I still carry him. He is afraid of the idea of a Father, and untrusting of it, because the only one he knew wasn't safe, and because at nine he screamed out in prayer for God the Father to stop my father, and nothing came.
A couple of years after my faith came apart, the people who helped me soften toward God again were not the ones with the best answers. They were evangelical friends who sat up with me past two in the morning and never once made their staying conditional on my coming back. One of them could hold his own convictions and the full weight of mine in the same room without needing to resolve the difference. I had not known that was possible. It did more for me than every argument anyone made.
That is what I keep finding in the gospels. Jesus touches the leper before he says a word about healing. He doesn't ask the paralytic to affirm anything first. At the well, the offer comes before the change, and the revelation of who he is comes last. He seems almost uninterested in making recognition the price of his presence. If God wanted to save the world by argument, thirty years of ordinary presence and three years of tables and touch is a strange way to go about it. Which makes me wonder whether the incarnation is the delivery system for the message or whether it is the message.
And this is where I land, for whatever it's worth from someone in my position. Jesus says eternal life is to know God. Present tense. Not a location you arrive at afterward. If that's right, then presence isn't the preliminary to eternal life. It's a taste of the thing itself. Every time someone stays in the room with a person they can't fix, something of that gets enacted here. I think this is the most lovely thing about the story of the incarnation.
I can't assert the metaphysics. I won't pretend otherwise with anyone. But you gave me a piece of it this morning by writing before you'd finished reading, and I wanted you to know it landed.
I like what you said about my being closer to God than I realize. In many ways I feel that. I just can't assert it the way I once did, because if I did, I'd be right back where I was before I left. So I hold the story of Jesus loosely and say I hope it's true, without claiming that it is.
Looking forward to connecting more.
Thank you for writing this because I know it took a lot for you to do so.
I am clapping for you and telling you to keep writing it out and talking about it aloud when you are ready. Decision by decision, it helps you release what you have carried and learn how to sit with it.
There are so many concepts of God and so many faiths. Sometimes I wonder why we cannot simply say, “We are believers,” instead of immediately separating ourselves as Catholic, Muslim, atheist, Christian, or something else.
Those labels can make people feel as though they must choose a side before they have had the freedom to discover what they are truly seeking.
I want to share something with the twelve-year-old you that I once shared with my brother after we lost our mother when he was thirteen:
“It is okay to let it all out. It is okay not to know. Is God there? I dare you to find out and tell me when you do. I can lead you toward what I know, but what is far more profound is when you discover a truth greater than anything another person in this world could tell you.”
Everyone I know who has a deep relationship with God, not merely religion, has had some version of the fight you are having now. The journey away, the questioning, and sometimes the return with new eyes can change everything.
And there are always people who will listen to you without needing you to reach the same conclusion they have.
Food for thought: sometimes religion becomes the barrier between a person and their relationship with God. Other paths can shatter what was built around that relationship and make the way forward feel much clearer.
I do not know what that path is for you. But I believe that if you are willing to go down the rabbit hole honestly, something within you will recognize the truth and say, “Right here.”
Thanks for your thoughtful words, Cora. Thanks for sharing vulnerably about your own life and the words you shared with your brother after your own painful loss.
I am hopeful about this journey I'm on now, but it definitely has a different feel than the one I was on when I was certain about the divine. I mostly sit in a place of kind reflection on my past religious experience and seek to understand the deeper meaning underneath the religious text, holding it with honest curiosity instead of as a rigid safety net.
But I know that for many people, including the version of myself ten years ago, doing that, and arguing that a person can do that, would have been destabilizing to my own sense of self, because of how much of my identity was supported by the belief that it was the only truth in the world I could be sure of.
So this process of writing is me trying my best to honor that scared twelve-year-old while being kind to the people around me who are also carrying something real when they encounter my work. As you saw in the article, and as I mentioned to you, the struggle is still happening, and I'm definitely still having to be kind to myself and ask for forgiveness when I let the scared child version of myself drive.
And honestly, had I just been soft and allowed myself to cry and sit with that young boy, I could have saved myself a lot of grief and pain between me and my wife. This article is my way of reminding myself to choose that instead of the anger and aggression.
That's what you mean when you say there are always people who will listen without needing you to reach the same conclusion they have. Thank you for being one of them.
Thank you for this incredibly honest (and well written) chapter / article. Your drive to be honest, and seek the truth at what can feel like great risks is SO inspiring. In my Faith there is a quote I love -- "Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues." I believe that speaking what's true for us, heals us and leads us to the whole truth. And in that process all other virtues -- like the ones you write about with such conviction and passion -- can grow in healthy ways, virtues like courage, and faith, and forgiveness, and grace, and love, and beauty, and mercy... Thank you for writing and for digging so deep. Your journey is powerful, and liberating, and courageous -- and will inspire so many people seeking more honest relationships with themselves, with others, and with God.
Thanks for your kind words Bruce. Honesty for me feels like the only concrete thing I truly possess in my life. After losing touch with the metaphysical certainty, all I have left to be sure about how I'm feeling and what my life looks like. Much of the faith still feels incredibly relevant to me and at the same time it is so painful. I'm thankful for people like you in my life that model a love and appreciation for spirituality and at the same time can hold space for being unsure and still have tremendous curiosity. I'm glad to have you in my life 😁
Trevor, I appreciate the honesty and vulnerability it takes to write openly about something as weighty as the fear of hell. This is not merely an abstract theological question when someone has spent years believing that eternity is at stake. I can understand why those questions would remain emotionally significant even after your beliefs have changed.
As a believer in Christ, however, I approach hell differently than seeing it primarily as a doctrine intended to frighten people into religious obedience. Scripture presents God as holy and just, humanity as genuinely accountable for sin, and judgment as real. But the Christian message does not end with judgment. At the center of the gospel is what God has done to save sinners through Jesus Christ.
That distinction matters to me. Christianity is not ultimately “behave correctly or God will send you to hell.” None of us can make ourselves righteous enough before a holy God. The gospel is that Christ lived the righteous life we could not live, bore the judgment sinners deserve, died, and rose again. Salvation is received by grace through faith in Him, not earned through fear-driven religious performance.
I also appreciate your willingness to examine difficult questions rather than pretending they do not exist. I would only encourage anyone wrestling with this subject to examine Christ Himself and the claims of Scripture carefully, rather than evaluating Christianity solely through painful religious experiences or imperfect representations of it. If Christianity is true, then the answer to our fear of judgment is ultimately not denial of judgment, but refuge in Christ.
Thank you for sharing something this personal, Trevor. Even though we may arrive at different conclusions, I appreciate the opportunity to understand your perspective and engage with it respectfully.
Elias,
Thank you for reading it carefully and for the kindness in how you wrote.
I want to clarify,, because you may have read my reason for leaving as smaller than it was. I did not leave because I was hurt by Christians or because I encountered a bad representation of the faith. I spent twenty years inside it, studied systematic theology and biblical theology, and taught the atonement you just described to other people. I know the difference between grace and religious performance. I preached it.
I left because of a problem I could not resolve. If God is a father who loves me the way I love my daughters, and if he has all power, then he watched what happened in my house when I was nine and did nothing. I screamed for him out loud, once, while my father put his head through a wall, and the answer was silence. Every theodicy I know, and I know most of them, answers that intellectually and does not touch it.
I would also gently push back on the last line. I am not denying judgment in order to feel better. If that were what I was doing, I would have picked a version of it that hurt less. The essay you read is about a man who no longer believes in hell and is still afraid of it. That is not denial. That is what it looks like when the fear outlives the belief.
But I appreciate you engaging with it rather than around it. Most people do not.