12. Leaving the Orbit

An Explosive Truth, a Broken Network, and Leaving the Sun Behind

A Stairwell Conversation

I was in the basement working on fixing up the downstairs bedroom. As I normally do, I listened to podcasts to keep my brain occupied while I worked. I had begun listening to people tell their stories about deconverting from Christianity. At first, I was not doing it so that I could deconvert. I actually saw it as a way to stay in the faith. Hearing their stories about why they left would make me want to stay in it, weird as that seems.

Mary came down the stairs to ask me about something. I was painting, so I could not immediately pause the podcast, and she heard what was playing. I could tell she was upset and wanted to talk. I paused the audio and sat by her on the stairs, noticing that she was tearing up.

I asked her what was wrong.

“I’m worried that if you leave the faith, you’ll want to leave me as well,” she said.

I was relieved to hear this. Not because I wanted her to cry, but because I was afraid of the reverse. In some ways, it took the pressure off of me and allowed me to finally feel the weight of the struggle I was in.

An October Surprise

By October 2023, I was listening to more and more people talk about their stories, and I had taken a break from attending church with my family. This specific week, I was listening to Bart Ehrman talk with one of my favorite podcasters, Alex O’Connor. He was talking with him about the historicity of the gospel accounts and the resurrection narrative.

Since my initial investigation into the trustworthiness of the scriptures back when I was seventeen, I had been convinced about the reliability of the gospel accounts regarding the resurrection of Jesus. Specifically, I relied on the testimony of Paul. Why would these men who witnessed this event lie about the resurrection? What did they have to gain? Why be killed for a lie? Even more, I believed Paul was the strongest evidence. Why would he convert when he had been actively killing Christians?

Then I listened to Bart give an alternative analysis of Paul that I had never considered before. He explained a theory about how Paul may have truly had a vision on the road to Damascus, but that it could have been caused by his own emotional guilt from helping prosecute the people who claimed to be Christians. His vision was not an embodied person like the rest of the apostles. He did not put his hands in the wounds of Jesus like the rest of the disciples.

From my new understanding of psychology, I could easily see how he could have been hyper-fixated on them, lacked food or sleep, and had a vision. We know that this phenomenon can happen to a brain deprived of what it needs.

An overwhelming sense of fear gripped me. For the first time since I was seventeen, I was no longer completely convinced that Jesus rose from the dead. The ground dropped out from underneath me. I had lost the hope of life after death and my existential kangaroo care. I was vulnerable once again.

A Defensive Proclamation

A week had passed since that time. Mary and I had recently started back up with couples counseling again. We had done this in the past when I first entered into therapy to help us deal with the intensity of my anger. We reached out to our therapist who saw us two years ago to process the issues I was having with the faith and the disruption to our marriage because of it. We had a session scheduled this day, and I knew I was going to tell her the truth.

I wanted to tell her before we started our session, but I chickened out. I knew this information was going to change everything about how we related to each other. We had met each other as members of a Christian ministry. We had discussed our lives together as possible Christian missionaries before we got married. Our wedding had a sermon preached at it, and we took communion during our service. Everything in our life had been built around the faith. The faith to us was not a thing we did on holidays or Sundays. Christianity was the sun we orbited around, and I was intentionally leaving that orbit.

She was frustrated and afraid. She had been my stable and emotionally healthy rock, and I had just strapped an explosive device to our relationship and detonated it.

From the defensiveness of her response, I decided that I wanted to tell the people in our lives directly, rather than having her do it. I was also defensive about how this would all play out, and I wanted to try and control the variables as much as possible. While in some ways I was a lot healthier emotionally, I had just lost my existential stabilizing framework. Now, I was feeling alienated from my best friend and the person who had known me best.

The Mass Text

I wrote up a text message to send out to all of the people I felt needed to know about what I had just shared with Mary. I sent it to her immediate family and several different friends who were close to me in my life, mostly friends at work.

I explained that this was not a rash decision and that I had been thinking about it for the past two years. Most of all, I explained to them that I did not want to debate it or have them try to keep me from leaving the faith. My mind was made up, and I could no longer believe the way I did previously.

One of my driving arguments for the deconversion centered on a realization I had about Jesus. While I loved the idea of Him, I realized I didn’t have an actual relationship with Him. I had simply projected and created one. It was like boasting about a relationship with a girl who lived in another state, talking non-stop about how amazing she was, how much she loved me, and how deeply connected we were. But if someone were to ask how long we had been dating, I would have to confess that I had never actually met her or spoken to her in my life. It sounds completely bizarre when framed that way. Yet that is essentially what I had been doing with Jesus all those years. I loved the idea of Him, and I had mistakenly internalized that intellectual affection as a real relationship

Most people honored my request. A few did not and tried to schedule a meeting with me to convince me of why I was wrong. Not only had I lost my framework, I was losing a sense of connection with my friends, my family, and my wife.

It was not that anyone had explicitly said to me, “now that you are not a Christian, we can’t talk to you.” No one did that, even though the deepest parts of my subconscious feared that would happen. The reality is, in some ways, that might have been better. That would have allowed me to vilify them and feel justified in my anger and disconnection from them.

Instead, it felt like I was someone they felt sorry for and did not know how to relate to anymore. It was like I had terminal cancer and was dying. I pictured them talking to Mary behind my back through text messages, consoling her about her loss and asking her how they could help. Her friends all rallied around her. She even wept openly to a mutual friend of ours about how I was leaving the faith.

I was embarrassed, isolated, and lonely. All of my support network and friends, even my work over the past seventeen years, was built on the mutual cause of Christianity.

I had no one.


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