Unlearning Christianity

Many Christian churches claim to have all the answers. What happens when you realize that they are wrong?  Is it possible to let go of what was wrong while learning to hold on to what is good and true?  I’m sharing part of my story about the process of unlearning what I was taught.

The following is a text version of this posting.

A few years ago, I realized that I was no longer comfortable calling myself a Christian.  I came to this decision for many reasons.  As I learned more in fields like theology, Biblical studies, and history, I came to understand that much of what I was taught was wrong.  At the same time, I found that there’s great wisdom in the teachings of Jesus and many of his followers.

Like many others, I was raised in a church that taught me that the beliefs of my particular church were right and everyone else was wrong.  Some people, like other Christians, were a little bit wrong.  Other people, specifically non-Christians, were very wrong. It was claimed that the church was founded by God and was infallible.  That was a bold claim.  Honestly, it’s a claim that has no basis and can’t be substantiated. After all, it’s a statement of circular logic.  It’s like saying, “This is true because I say it’s true.”

In the 1970s, when I was in training to be a hospital chaplain, a process called Clinical Pastoral Education, I was taught that when I entered a patient’s room, all of the church and its teachings walked in with me.  That was extremely burdensome.  One implication of this was I should not deviate from the church’s teaching when speaking to a patient because if the patient heard something different from me than they’d hear in their local church, it would cause the patient to have internal conflicts and doubts.  Such conflicts of faith could irreparably harm the immortal soul of the patient.  That was a very well-contrived guilt trip meant to assure compliance with dogma among the ministers of the church. 

Having a degree in philosophy which was required before I studied theology, I understood that the church’s theology was based on something called natural law philosophy.  Natural law philosophy posits that all of nature follows inherent laws from God.  Those laws can’t be changed. Further, the church is the only correct interpreter of those laws because we, as individuals, are sinful and can’t grasp God’s laws. 

Natural law philosophy never made sense to me.  I had enough of an interest in physics and astronomy to know that there were lots of things in nature that didn’t follow set laws and that there was randomness and chaos in the universe.  When I was introduced to existentialism and phenomenology, I found something that made a great deal of sense to me.  Existentialism focuses on the individual’s freedom and responsible entity.  Phenomenology is focused on the importance of our experience.  These two schools of philosophy made a lot of sense to me.  Then in the 1980s, I was introduced to feminist theology and my eyes opened widely.

A key aspect of feminist theology is that theology begins not from laws pre-set by God but from an individual’s unique and particular experience.  Each person lives in a context and from that context, we know and understand the world, ourselves, each other, and God.  That made so much sense to me.  As I read feminist and other similar theologies like liberation theology, I began to see the rigid walls of faith I was taught were pointless and only served to maintain an institutional structure.

Fast forwarding to today, after serious study of new theologies as well as investigating Biblical scholarship from the last twenty years, I’ve come to understand that institutional Christianity and its dogma and doctrine were primarily designed for two reasons:  maintaining political empires and supporting a self-serving religious institution.  With those realizations, I have moved on from institutional Christianity.  But I continue to value the wisdom of the teachings of Jesus as well as the way many people who were within the Christian tradition experienced the Divine in profound ways.  Further, I’ve felt free to learn from other traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Native American spiritualities.  I’m most at home with the teachings of Jesus but I’m interspiritual in my understanding of life and reality.  I think that both spirituality and theology are the products of the contexts, cultures, and situations in which we find ourselves.

Recently, I came to realize that giving up the label of “Christian” and embracing the description of being “a follower of the teachings of Jesus” has enabled me to move from a religious understanding of right dogma to a place where I am comfortable to be on a journey and growing as best I can.  This shift has been extremely freeing.

I’m unlearning Christianity.  In the process, I am relearning what it means to be a follower of Jesus, a teacher whose path leads to a greater and deeper life for everyone.