I wasn’t going to do this. No need to hash this out in public. But as I have been wrestling for more than a year now about my journey with (away from?) the church, and the more I realize that many others are doing the same, I wondered if we could learn from each other…so I’m keeping an open journal of this journey.

Background: In summary, the 2016 election followed by the response to COVID massively disrupted my faith in the church and rocked my personal faith. Stunned by the election of a brash, angry, crooked businessman with five children by three women and countless reports of sexual assault and harassment who was elected in large part by the pro-life, pro-family, conservative Christian crowd, I just couldn’t reconcile what I had grown up with and believed with what I was seeing and experiencing. Next, during COVID, I witnessed so many Christians spewing aggressive rhetoric and propagating lies about transmission, vaccines, and masks and refusing to offer to do their part to mitigate the spread of a deadly infection with basic public health measures, including churches being defiant or ambivalent about maskless mass gatherings. My own church at the time, even after my passionate pleas that they not open the doors to throngs of people during a surge of COVID in the fall of 2021, did anyway. Next, I was learning that this church espoused a belief called complementarianism, a belief that men and women are to hold different roles in the church, but what it really amounts to is patriarchy and the exclusion of women from teaching and leadership roles in the church. Add on a healthy dose of political unrest, racism, loss of reproductive healthcare, LGBTQ discrimination, and unmitigated firearm violence throughout 2020 and 2021. I was done. And we haven’t stepped foot in a church since March of 2020.

Appropriately challenged by a friend to “not throw the baby out with the bath water”, I have spent much of 2022 up to this day, trying to figure out my faith. Trying to figure out how I can still believe in Jesus (which I very much do!) while distancing myself from the mess of what so many people see in the group that calls themselves “Christians”. At this point, I am skittish to call myself a Christian, lest I be lumped in with the Jerry Fallwells, Marjorie Taylor Greens, and Charlie Kirks of the world.

So I have been reading (Jesus and John Wayne, and The Making of Biblical Womanhood have been particularly helpful) and listening to podcasts (The New Evangelicals and Straight White American Jesus are definitely worth a listen). I have also done a fair amount of soul-searching on the issues of race (Caste, The Color of Law, Between the World and Me, How to Be an Anti-Racist, and Stamped from the Beginning have all been powerful reads) and LGBTQ (Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Chruch) over the past several years, finding myself increasingly diverging from the conservative viewpoints of my past. I explored the painful issue of abortion in a prior blog to won’t rehash it here, but needless to say, the black-and-white issue I believed it to be when I was younger, was a pile of propaganda fed to me by politicians who wanted to leverage the issue to gain political power in the Republican party. (You can read that history here: Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right)

So here I am. A bit angry. A bit lost. A bit sad. But not ready to give up.

I found another encouraging author and podcaster, Kate Boyd, whose Messy Middle podcast really gave me hope. I binged this series and came away claiming her word: instead of “deconstruction” of my faith, she says “detangle”. And that’s exactly how I feel. I don’t want to give up, walk away, be bitter, or turn my back on God. But what the evangelical/non-traditional “Christian” world has to offer me right now looks little like Jesus and I want no part of it.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I am focusing solely on Jesus. That’s right. The red letters in the Bible. I have decided to spend as long as it takes, reading slowly, and digesting Jesus’ words in the four gospels. I am starting with Matthew. I just hit the Sermon on the Mount…and let me tell you, I am gonna be here for a while.

The last two days I thought about posting something about this journey but didn’t. Nah…who cares anyway? But I can’t let go of the nudge that I feel…so ok, ok, God. I will put it out there in case anyone else wants to do this detangling thing along with me.

I will use this blog to record my musings and feelings and what I learn. I will post on Twitter and Facebook. It won’t be every day. Some entries will be long. Some short. Leave me your comments. Welcome to my messy heart.

Disclaimer: My viewpoints are not necessarily reflective of my employer, or any local, regional or national organization that I belong to. As a matter of fact, I pretty much just speak for myself. Please keep that in mind.