Seeing that email in my inbox was like a thump to the chest.
Someone was inviting me to a workshop entitled “How to lose your faith.”
The description said it was going to be a zoom meeting where people would be trying to get rid of whatever belief was making them unhappy.
I’m deliberately not naming the creator. I’d love to give them credit, but I have a feeling they might be triggered by being evoked in this newsletter.
There’s a lot of space for doubt in these essays, of course. But there’s also plenty of room for belief, and I’m fully aware that at some point in the journey, even the possibility of belief is painful. (“I want to kill my hope,” I once wrote at a time of great darkness. “I want to kill it dead so it never comes back to hurt me.”) But, if you shoot me a PM, I’ll gladly provide the link and the name.
As I was reading the description, in a flash, the question formed in my mind. It ran through me like an electric current.
The feeling was so strong that I wanted to grab my phone and call my closest friend—the friend who I have all these deep conversations with, the friend who was fast asleep in a different hemisphere, in a different timezone.
I wanted to wake them up and scream down the receiver in big capital letters, “IS YOUR FAITH MAKING YOU UNHAPPY?”
It’s easy to frame everything that’s happening to you in a positive way. (It’s not easy. It’s the hardest thing in the world.)
You’re not losing beliefs—you’re forming new ones. You’re not failing at relationships—you’re just gaining skills to develop better ones. The sign for “crisis” in Japanese also has the meaning of “opportunity.” Haven’t you heard?
We know this! And yet.
I remember a friend telling me once, “When it happened, there was this feeling of surprise, most of all. It caught me off guard how much such a thing can hurt.”
Curiously, our society has this tendency to treat dis/belief as if it were static.
There’s an air of determinism when it comes to religious conviction or lack thereof. “I’m Catholic” is a finite statement, similar to “I was born in Vilnius,” “My eyes are brown,” or “I’m blonde.”
Have you ever heard this? “I may not like it, but the Bible/the church says so, so…” (Code for: “I don’t really know what I think about this issue, and it seems overwhelming and painful to engage with it on my own. So I’ve subscribed to this package deal that checks all of these boxes for me.”)
I never studied theology formally, though I tried several times. Now I probably never will—the moment has passed. But I’m familiar with admissions processes at various theological colleges. Many require that you sign an affidavit saying that you agree with some historical creed or their own statement of faith.
Isn’t it interesting? It’s like enrolling in an applied linguistics program and hearing, “Welcome to our department! Before you start, please sign here to confirm you agree with Noam Chomsky’s writings.”
For those of you who are outside of the linguistics world, Noam Chomsky is a revolutionary thinker who has basically transformed the way we scientists approach language.
His most famous claim is that the knowledge of language structure (i.e., syntax) is to some extent inborn—that humans come into this world wired for language acquisition. There is a lot of evidence that seems to support this claim’s validity and then a lot that seems to disprove it.
Because ultimately, how would you test a claim like that in a lab? The problem with linguistics is that you cannot experiment on a live brain while it is functioning in its natural circumstances. You are left to make your statements about the brain by looking at its output—a rather roundabout way of doing things.
You can measure brain activation to assess more or less which part of the brain is busy at a given moment. You can study patients with brain injury to see how the trauma has impacted their language ability. But what you get from these studies is an informed approximation. In the end, as one of my professors put it a long time ago, Chomsky’s claim of Universal Grammar, or of grammar being innate, is much like God. You either believe it, or you don’t.
Chomsky’s theories have been widely criticized from various angles. New language acquisition theories have emerged since the 60s, when he first started to publish his work.
The beautiful thing about Chomsky, however, is that he himself has no qualms about finetuning or revamping his proposals. What he believes now, we can say, is much more developed and streamlined than what he proposed in his first writings.
And that’s what I really like about him, you know? To me, his attitude is the perfect example of what a scholar should be all about.
There might be some prestige attached to academia, but when you think about it, this is a field where you basically take it for granted that you will publish your failures. You will document, blow by blow, how you wanted to prove something and ended up not getting the results you had hoped for. You will publish working hypotheses, and later, you will need to adjust or retract them. You will have to make your peace with the fact that your ideas will be challenged, criticized, or disproven. You will have to expand on your previous claims and conclusions.
I remember three months after defending my Ph.D., I was writing an article on my dissertation topic—and my thinking had already changed. I kept reviewing my data and finetuning what I wrote not even a year earlier. I’d also changed some terminology; then I had to change it again when a couple of colleagues pointed out at a conference that the terms I had settled on could be misleading in some contexts. This is simply how it is when you’re navigating unchartered territory. This is what you do as a scientist.
That is also why the idea of entering a course in linguistics and signing a paper saying you believe everything Chomsky has said is incompatible with the spirit of academia.
Sure, it’s a given that if you want to do any kind of linguistic research, you will have to engage with Chomsky’s theories. But science is not about sitting around in a circle reveling in how you cannot improve on past ideas. It’s about making your own discoveries.
The analogy between Christian thought and linguistic research is not perfect, of course.
But then again, it’s common knowledge that our beliefs and doubts evolve over time. Nothing earth-shattering about it. Our convictions and our questions were different when we were teenagers and different when we were young adults, and so on.
In fact, if they don’t change, it’s a cause for concern—an indication we’re just skimming through our life stories, not paying attention to the plot line.
Also, importantly, Christian thought is connected to a specific collection of ancient documents. (“Documents” not in the modern, notary sense, but in the sense of source texts from the past. The collection is there with other manuscripts, tablets, and inscriptions, for example, the Code of Hammurabi or Sennacherib’s annals, or the Egyptian Book of the Dead.)
This connection ties Christian thought to specific fields of research done by scholars who obviously have their own dis/beliefs, but they’re not doing denominational research—they’re simply doing research.
Some of these fields are Ancient Near Eastern studies, Semitic, Roman, and Greek language studies, history, archeology, anthropology, textual criticism, and so on. Thanks to the preoccupation with “what the Bible says” in Christian circles, much of this non-denominational research has very practical implications for theology, doctrine, and what they call “Christian ethics.” Therefore, it directly affects the substance of belief and doubt.
For example, when you read textual criticism, you have to engage critically with the idea that the collection of disparate ancient texts we now call “the Bible” has always existed in the form we have it in now.
Or, when you read ancient Near Eastern legal texts or marriage contracts or slave purchase contracts, then you have to revisit the idea that “the Biblical grounds for divorce” are only adultery and desertion.
Or, when you go through inscriptions and literature from the beginning of the Common Era, you have to rethink the notion that women have never occupied leadership positions in the church.
We could go on and on.
All of this research is happening right now. In theological speak, we talk of “progressive revelation,” a term for God revealing Themselves to humanity progressively, or bit by bit, throughout history. This revelation culminated in the life and death of the Man Jesus Christ.
It is an open question, of course, whether the Sacred, with such a longstanding penchant for revealing Their character to humankind, really decided around the 1st century C.E. that all of a sudden They had nothing more to say.
But that’s a different topic. For now, the interesting thing is the other part of this equation. If the Sacred is continually revealing Themselves to us, then it follows that our knowledge of the Sacred will also deepen and expand over time.
As apostle Paul said in Athens, “In Him we live and move and have our being… for we are indeed His offspring.”
Curiously, Paul is citing here two “pagan”, “heathen” poets, Epimenides and Callimachus, who weren’t even writing about the Hebrew/Christian deity at all.
They were writing about Zeus—the head god of the Greek pantheon, some few hundred years before the birth of Christ.
Marketing Christian theology in its present state as a final product that cannot be improved on is setting a lot of people up for painful crises of conscience—but when they dare speak up, it’s hands off.
“Abuse does not negate proper use,” goes the chorus, so why waste time taking a closer look at the broken system.
(By the way, hear how illogical the first sentence is! The “present state” of Christian theology or the “present form” of the Biblical text are also products of various scholarly pursuits, mainly from the Renaissance and Reformation era. They did not just magically appear one day, stamped with the seal of approval from the Almighty.)
Have you noticed that in church, we frequently hear about “accepting” or “receiving” the faith?
This phrasing implies certain powerlessness on our part. Again, a sense of determinism.
In academia, you don’t “accept” or “receive” the state of research—you engage with it. You bear it out. You change some of the variables and repeat it. You build on it. You publish your results so others can learn from your mistakes and hopefully not waste time the way you did, at least.
In church, it doesn’t help that we are exposed to many religious beliefs as children when we have no means to assess their validity and defend ourselves. They’re often presented by people we trust, people who have our best interest in mind.
Then we grow up, and all of a sudden we find ourselves in a struggle with a powerful institution and a petty, vengeful entity portrayed to us as “god.”
I’ve heard more than once from religious trauma survivors, “If I believed in God, I would have to hate him.”
Still, no one is responsible.
The fact that we don’t view ourselves as curious, creative agents when it comes to religious dis/belief often makes us coast in our “spiritual lives.”
(It’s possible to coast in agnosticism or atheism, of course, or whatever ism we’ve subscribed to as the package deal that ticks all of the boxes for us.)
We don’t typically think ahead to how the consumption of this particular dis/belief will impact our health long-term.
Unless we’re forced to (usually when things explode in our faces), we rarely check in with what the contents of our dis/beliefs do to us—how they change us, how we metabolize them, what feelings they evoke in us, what chemistry they create in the brain, how they wire our relationships with others and ourselves, what energies they release into our body, what life they create for us.
I was nervous about telling Grandma my marriage was ending. We’d always had a good relationship, and she’d known for a long time I’d been struggling. But she’s also close to a century old. Divorce was rare in her day. It was rarer still in Evangelical circles.
I was nervous but mostly just tired. I was tired throughout that year.
I sat down beside her and told her I’d decided to divorce my husband. She took my hand (her hands marble-cool, kalte Hände, heiße Liebe) and nodded her head slowly a couple of times.
She seemed ill at ease, eager to reassure me somehow. (Unhappiness is so embarrassing to witness, isn’t it?) She said, in an explanatory kind of way, “Was zu schwer zu tragen ist, das muss man absetzen.”
You need to set down what is too heavy to carry.
Over the following months, I would break the news to other people, multiple times. It became a skit, almost. People demanded explanations like they thought they were entitled to updates on the state of my union. I would send messages and make calls, close accounts and talk to representatives, count my savings and figure out bills, worked throughout. I put down in black and white what I had never told anyone and I never will so I could take it to a guy in a suit so he could read it, edit it and take it to more strangely apparelled people so they could read it and then make it part of the public record forever. My only hope is that I will live and die in relative obscurity so no one is ever tempted to look and find out how stupid and gullible and clueless I really am.
Throughout that farce, Grandma’s words were just about the only comment that made the least bit of sense.
It wasn’t that they offered absolution. No. It wasn’t that easy.
But they were clean-cut. They reminded me of something a doctor might say, looking at the x-rays. “Hand is broken in two places.” “There’s fluid in your lungs.” Or, checking the monitors, “Patient expired at 13.09.”
My package deal—the one I had subscribed to to check all of the boxes for me—went with my marriage.
There was my faith in a lot of what they call, misleadingly, Christian ethics. There was my faith in the church as an institution with some authority. My respect for the church (such as it was.) My faith in marriage. My belief that love should be a certain way—the way that had been presented to me as right and aspirational. My hope that for all my doubts, for all the wildness of my heart, I could have a largely linear, normal life—settle down, have babies, get a regular job, fuss over the mess in his truck.
The heartbreaking and funny and wondrous thing about losing your beliefs is that you don’t die.
No. You don’t die.
You’re just lying there with your hands over your head, eyes shut, cringing at the falling debris, listening to the arrhythmia of explosions.
Then, at some point, a long time in, when things have quieted down somewhat, it suddenly occurs to you that you’re still there. Still aware. You open one eye and squint. Maybe you pat yourself all over. Maybe you prop yourself up.
And there you are, like some kind of a zombie Samson, in a scene of desolation.
Days and months and sometimes years pass, and then, one day, maybe, just maybe, you start doing your own research.
A word of caution: I am not a religious trauma counselor. If you have been hurt by institutionalized religion to the point that it is seriously affecting your daily life (panic attacks, uncontrollable anger, loss of focus, constant triggering, numbness, and out-of-body experiences), I strongly urge you to stop reading and contact a health professional near you. Your pain is real and should be attended to.