Why I Left Christianity

I cannot find peace in an institution that too often fails to demonstrate Jesus’s teachings.

“Who wants me to read their cards?”

If you had known me in high school and invited me to a sleepover, it was a guarantee that I’d pull out my tarot cards and offer to do a reading or two. This never failed to make for awkward, tense moments — at least one person would express their discomfort, telling me those cards were made by the devil and that I was bringing Satan into the room by even holding them in my hand.

But I’d always plunge forward, because dammit, someone would want a reading — there was always someone. And I’d read for them, while the more conservative friends would leave the room, or threaten to holler for the host’s mother who would surely shut down this heathen debauchery.

Looking back, I can see that I failed to be sensitive to certain friends’ concerns and perspectives, but in my defense, it was born from ignorance. I was not raised like that.

…at least one person would express their discomfort, telling me those cards were made by the devil and that I was bringing Satan into the room...

I knew my parents identified as Christian, but other than celebrating Christian holidays, they did not practice their faith. My dad’s parents were immigrants — his father a Danish philosopher who never talked about religion, his mother an Irish Protestant who hated Catholics so much, she didn’t come to my father’s first wedding when he married a Catholic woman. He was hurt by that and kept religion at an arm’s length for the duration of my childhood.

My mother’s parents were both practicing Christians, but her mother’s side had dabbled with tarot cards, séances, and other such divination for generations. There was no separation between Christianity and these more pagan practices. And though she went to church for most of her life, when she was in her early twenties, a scandal occurred that made her lose faith in her church officials and she decided she would never attend again.

So in my household, we didn’t go to church. We didn’t talk a lot about religion. My parents shared with us Jesus’s teachings — he has always been an important spiritual figure to my mother — but told us we could choose our own way.

They had a light touch about it, which is, I would soon find out, not at all the way the rest of the world seemed to engage with religion.

I learned early on that the friends that I had who identified as Christians were very particular. If you loved Jesus, you would do this and not do that. They told me exactly what I was doing wrong (which was almost everything) and how to fix it in order to make sure I would go to heaven.

I had a lot of problems with this nonsense from the get-go. For one thing, my parents had taught us that there was no devil, no hell. My mother specifically told me, on many occasions, “I want you to be a good person because it’s the right thing to do. Not because you’re afraid of what will happen to you after you die.”

I deeply understood her meaning, even as a child, and I longed to be that good person who was good just to be good.

As it turned out, though, one could not be good if one didn’t believe in the devil or hell. That was bad. One was also supposed to go to church (said with withering glances when I confessed we did not attend). One was supposed to declare one’s religious beliefs loudly and often. One was supposed to stop taking off her shirt and running topless through the sprinklers.

“I want you to be a good person because it’s the right thing to do. Not because you’re afraid what will happen to you after you die.”

Though I wouldn’t say I have a particularly rebellious personality, I found myself intensely antagonized by all these rules that didn’t make any sense to me. Even as a very young child, I felt a deep connection with my Creator. I felt the Divine in the wind, the trees, the dirt. I knew in my heart the Divine was pure love and peace. I believed that there was nothing we could do that would disconnect us from this love or this energy — certainly not running half-naked through the sprinklers.

So I did my best to be tolerant of these religious opinions that made no sense to me and to just go about my life the way I had been living it.

I saw evidence of the hate that twists so subversively through Christianity as soon as I hit adolescence while attending a private Lutheran school. One of my teachers made a statement about AIDS that was so violent, so hateful, so homophobic, that I physically recoiled. I knew I had to sit there and tolerate his hatred because he was my teacher, but I also knew he was wrong. The God of my understanding was nothing like the one he described and I felt overwhelming anger toward him for trying to make my classmates believe that God would not only turn Her back on whole groups of people, but deliberately design their slow and painful deaths.

To this day, I feel such disgust and rage well up inside me when I think of how many times Christian leaders have planted this hateful dogma into the impressionable hearts of children. To me, that is a spiritual violation of the worst kind.

I also found that the white, male teachers at my Christian schools (I attended several over the years) were some of the most dangerous people I had ever met. I had one teacher who constantly poked at my insecurities, often not stopping until I cried. My geometry teacher regularly stood over me and proclaimed, “This young lady is the dumbest student I’ve ever had in all my years of teaching.” Then there was the handsy basketball coach-slash-chaplain who would grab me whenever I walked by and crush me in unwanted embraces, whispering in my ear that I was such a beautiful young lady.

To this day, I feel such disgust and rage well up inside me when I think of how many times Christian leaders have planted this hateful dogma into the impressionable hearts of children.

And then, of course, was all the dogma around sexuality. Wait, what sexuality? We were not sexual beings, nor were we supposed to be, they told us. Sexual pleasure was a sin. Remember, that will get you straight into hell.

I’d sit there during school chapel period (yes, it was a full 55-minute “class”) looking around at all the religious symbols and feeling confused. I still didn’t believe in hell or the devil. And dammit, I just wanted to masturbate in peace. Was it so much to ask to go back to the days of my childhood when I could do that without shame? Now, every orgasm came with an overwhelming feeling of guilt and shame, even though I intellectually rejected the notion that it was a sin or my ticket to hell.

They had gotten under my skin. I felt like my sexuality was something to be ashamed of.

My sister got into witchcraft when she was a teenager and I immediately felt a connection with it. In fact, it seemed so natural — like a religion I had been practicing my whole life. I already attended “church” regularly (being out with the trees and sky). I already felt a deep connection to the earth as my Creator. Everything seemed to fit so perfectly.

Though I have always been very private about my religious practices, I think it was obvious to my friends that I was now fully embracing this tarot-reading, earth-loving tendency of mine. Some were fine with it; others were deeply troubled.

But I didn’t care. Every day, I was seeing hypocrisy and even violence in the Christian religion. I still believed in Jesus’s teachings, but I didn’t believe in the way the church bastardized those teachings.

This was a major point of contention between me and my last partner. He was a non-practicing evangelical Christian when we met and though he didn’t go to church at the time, he was very concerned that I was dancing a little too closely with the devil. He thought it was naïve that I didn’t believe in hell. He was put off that I thought of sexuality as an expression of the soul when he believed it was a dirty impulse that humans can’t seem to control.

I still believed in Jesus’s teachings, but I didn’t believe in the way the church bastardized those teachings.

He often insisted that I submit to his beliefs and when I asked why I should be forced to do that, he answered by saying, “Because I’m a white man, just like Jesus, which means his teachings are inborn within me. He gave us that as part of our responsibility to be spiritual leaders in this world.”

Oh right. There’s another reason why I kept stepping further and further away from Christianity. Because of the way Western culture has turned it into a machine of white supremacy.

Look at all the depictions of Jesus and you will see a white man. Ask people who grew up in conservative, small towns like the one in which I currently live, and they will claim Jesus was a white dude. Their insistence on this “miracle” of a white man being born in the middle east (or is it technically Western Asia?) is a flaming, explosive indicator of how toxic some branches of Christianity are.

I don’t consider myself a Christian anymore. If you forced me to label myself, I would say that my religion is the earth. My god is Mother Nature. My soul belongs to the infinite universe.

I still study A Course in Miracles. I still resonate with Christian terminology, though interpreted through my own perspective, not as the church tried to teach it to me. I still consider Jesus an important spiritual teacher.

But I’m more likely to turn a prayer into a spell. I’ll always find church in the woods, rather than in a stuffy building with hard pews. I’ll always trust my own heart and soul more than I trust the leaders of Christianity who insist that I should believe what they tell me without question.

The truth is, I believe Christianity (and yes, some others religions, too) has committed terrible crimes on humanity over the past 2,000 years. Still, the church does not acknowledge this, and still, it continues to perpetuate these crimes by twisting the words of Jesus into weapons of hate, homophobia, racism, and sexism.

I’ll always trust my own heart and soul more than I trust the leaders of Christianity who insist that I should believe what they tell me without question.

The Jesus that I know and believe in weeps to see what has been committed in his name. He is still lamenting to our Creator, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

I didn’t want to be a part of that even in my childhood and I definitely don’t want to be a part of it today.

So I’m gonna stand over here, a little bit away from the crowd, painting runes on my garden fence, celebrating the pagan sabbats, cultivating my kundalini energy while having orgasms in the woods, and doing everything I can to protect this world that I love.

I know, without a doubt, that Jesus is down with that.

Because, just in case folks forgot…he loves everyone. Without condition.

© Yael Wolfe 2020