Hey everyone, it’s been quite some time since I took to the blog, a couple months. Truth be told, I haven’t felt like I’ve had anything to say. And truth be even more told, sharing what I think scares me more than it ever has. So, if you’re reading this, I would like to again say thank you and welcome to my world of thoughts. I have always wanted to use this blog to share openly, in hopes that some of you reading this might feel encouraged by having a place on the internet where you can find something honest. I am in a fight with myself because I want everyone to know how “good” I am and how much I have it together, I want to project an image of wholeness, while on the other hand, I know that sharing our true selves is actually the more meaningful path. We are all struggling in some way, and most often very hidden ways, and I’ve always seen this blog as a means to help some of you (and me) feel like you’re not so crazy or you’re not so alone. Over the years, I have come to find that I’m not interested in speaking to the popular, the pious, or the successful… but the hurting, confused, and wayward. Because for most of my existence I have felt like the latter.
When it comes to faith, and more specifically, Christianity, I long to see a space for the angry, traumatized and broken to understand that they can work out their anger with God and come out the other side a more whole, compassionate, and loving soul. If you are involved in Christianity, I probably don’t need to tell you that millennials are fleeing from the church. I am one of them. There is so much I am angry about, there was so much about my American church experience that was so wrong. Personally, I feel like religion stole some of my life. I feel like it didn’t prepare me for the real world and helped perpetuate a prolonged and inappropriate adolescence. I feel like it only taught me how to say “no” and not “yes.” A lot of people are really angry with the church and their experience. It’s like when you’re in a really bad friendship or relationship for a while, and you tolerate and minimize all of the ways you were really hurt by it, only to feel and realize all that anger, frustration and embarrassment later after you’ve gotten out of that situation. I’m very hesitant to use the word abuse, since I feel like even the idea of being abused is abused by us young people, but I really do feel like a lot of abuse has transpired within the walls of the church, it’s just so hard to identify and name because everything is tied to the idea of God and being in good standing with God.
For ,e, with all of our anger and trauma in mind, I feel like I’m being moved into a new space. I want more than ever now for young people and especially young people who have had a real and meaningful encounter with God, to feel like there is a way through all of this pain. From my own experience and my observations of my peers, I’ve found that a lot of us feel the need to escape completely from our religious environments. For me and for many others, we do this through rebellion, blame, and sometimes the destruction of our once-held values and belief systems. And what is most tragic about it all is that we have no guides… no voices to walk us through these shadowlands, and very few who are willing to share their experiences through this. There’s still so much shame attached to our brokenness, and we fear that if we are honest, we will no longer have a place in these environments. American Christianity is not equipped to handle most of the real questions of life, so most people, once they begin to uncover the tragedy and depth of life’s pain, feel like they have no choice but to walk away all together… because the Christianity we grew up in ceases to be relevant to our actual real-life experiences.
There are so many unique situations out there, and honestly, I don’t feel like I have any answers, but I felt deep in my heart that I needed to share my story, as I have always tried to do. I have to let a light into this dark spot of my experience. And though 99% of “letting the light in” happens beneath the surface in ways no one could ever see or know (as is true for every persons spiritual path), there is a freedom in being able to let you, whoever is reading, into it. Maybe there are a couple of you out there who are at the very end of your rope. Maybe your faith in the goodness of God and life is hanging on by a thread, or maybe it's been completely broken ad lost. maybe you’ve woken up today wondering, “how did I get here, who have I become? and what have I done with my life?” Maybe you feel abandoned by God. maybe you are feeling like your entire experience with God was an illusion, and you feel deceived and manipulated by a many number of people and places that claimed to represent God. Maybe you, like me, decided to put God on the shelf for a while and explore the dark and faithless corners of this world, and you’re finding yourself alone with the broken pieces of your life in front of you, wondering how it will be restored. I wish I could give you an answer, a step-by-step book to find your way back to where you want to be, but the truth is, no one can really give that to you. But what I can give you, is a look into my experience - a little breadcrumb of my life, broken off and left on the path for some travelers to find. Not all of you will need to walk this path, and some have already gone here, and some will go here in the future. I’m simply offering my story for any of you who might find yourselves here at some point in your life. Everything in me wants to write disclaimers, but I’m trusting myself enough to share this stuff unapologetically and without filter. I believe that only the truth can set us all free.
Escaping Christianity
For me, a lot of my young life revolved around the church and performing within the church’s system. This system, in my experience, had many channels that you had to perform for. There was the moral channel, the appearance channel, the social channel, and the musical performance channel. Ever since I became a Christian, I've always remembered feeling the need to perform perfectly for all these channels. Looking back, I’m not really sure who I was trying to please. I think everyone. And of course, I was just a kid, I wanted a place to belong and I wanted a community to approve of my lifestyle and my actions and who I was becoming. And because I was gifted in music, from the moment I was in the church, I was on stages. This began a long and arbitrary pursuit of Christian fame and identity that was built on being, to put it simply, “ successful Christian,” which I now believe to be an impossible goal (that’s an entirely different blog post). During this time, it was the hay-day of Christian celebrity. Passion, Hillsong, Chris Tomlin, Phil Wickham, Bethel, whatever… these were the people you wanted to become. My dream was to become one of these incredibly influential people, ultimately believing that God’s overarching will for my life was to become highly visible on a global scale. The Christian culture I was in then and throughout my early twenties really valued visibility, just as humans tend to do. We all loved the idea of becoming famous for our faith performances and musical ventures, all in the name of God. Who got the most impressive “word?” Who healed someone on the prayer walk? Who knew the famous worship leaders? who was invited to go write with these famous worship leaders? I wanted to become a God spectacle - so in tune with what God was saying and doing, as if to appear super-human and other-worldly. I was in circles of Christianity that you almost had to become an incredible weirdo to be God-like. It was almost like the more detached from reality you were, you were somehow more in tune (and therefore more loved) by God. We all ate this up. All this to say, the pressure within myself to be a perfect person was immense. After all, I wanted to be God’s elite in the world, elevated to high places of influence and visibility, therefore I had to be better than everyone else. But I’ve realized now, in my late twenties, after countless failures and my seemingly unending tendency to wander off and make messes out of my life, that I never really allowed myself to be me. I always needed to be better, and I felt like I was never enough. All this pressure over time, I’ve realized, has not allowed me to develop the art of being known for who I am. I write songs and do all this stuff on the internet, but when it comes to letting people really know me, I don’t know how. I feel cursed by a lot of the judgmental systems and performance-based social hierarchies that these religious environments were built on. To me, I find it increasingly ironic that churches preach unconditional love… because that was often the place where I would not find it. And I understand that this is a lot to do with my issues and my wounds, but I remember always having this feeling that I had to earn my love from the church. I paid for it by becoming a “somebody” within my Christian world. I paid for it with my spiritual performances, musical gifts, and my adherence to its moral codes and expectations. The love felt conditional after all.
I don’t mean to make a long story longer, and I want to spare the internet the dirty details of my dirty laundry. But I’ve spent this time rebelling pretty strongly against this system. I was angry for a really long time. I was angry at a Christianity that was so limited, that seemed to be only concerned about creating a safe tribe around itself and not actually expressing an unconditional love into the world. I started wondering: Are church’s just social clubs that had an “ace card” of control (the word of God) that they could use to control mass groups of people? After all, no one wants to be wrong in God's eyes. As my experiences broadened in my late twenties, and I started seeing how vast and kaleidoscopic the world was, I could not understand how Christian morals were even useful in today’s modern world. It seemed so archaic. It just seemed like the world was too big and too colorful to be confined into the narrow and dualistic religion I had known my whole life. I felt tricked. I felt like my experience with Christianity had robbed my life in away. I feel like the years that were designed for exploration, making mistakes, and figuring out I was were spent on trying to please a religious system. I felt like I gave my energy, soul and life, to a religion that was ill-equipped to engage with any actual experiences of our lives today. And then, when you mixed in the racism and the white supremacy that is woven into the church’s fabric, It was game over. I didn’t experience racism more than I did within the church - the white churches I was giving hours to each week, singing for, sacrificing for. I remember one time in high school, we brought in a “famous” worship leader from Passion City Church to lead a youth event, and during our little meeting before we played, he made a comment directly to me, making some joke about how many parents ran a dry cleaner (that’s a korean stereotype, by the way. I am Taiwanese). Isn’t that so fucked? and to think this is the kind of person that I dreamed of becoming all throughout my youth. To me, and many of us kids back then, this guy represented the marker for Christian success and influence. I didn’t realize that interaction was fucked until this year. And that’s how all this pain surfaces - I’ve heard it in a hundred different conversations from countless others - it’s often years and years later, because you didn’t know quite what was happening at the time, but as you mature and come into yourself, you realize the nastiness that was underneath the surface of your experience. It’s the same dynamic of an abusive relationship - where the abuser gets to move on with their lives and the victim is left with a shattered life, picking up the pieces by themselves.
All that to say, I feel like I left God for a while. I was still doing Christian things, after all, I had no idea where else I would go. My entire life I only developed one skill it seemed - how to be an American Christian. I knew all the songs, I knew how to talk like one, I knew how to earn applause in those circles, I knew what to say, what to read, and what to like and dislike. But later in life, I started to have this awkward and embarrassing feeling that I didn’t know how to just be a person and see people and the world as exactly that - people and the world. It was always us/them, in/out, christian/non christian, cool christian/non-cool christian, right christian/wrong-christian. I felt like I could not escape my experience and that my perspective was forever limited by the legalistic environment I was formed in. I wanted desperately to be away from that, to be away from performing, to be away from the feeling that people were always watching me, judging me, being let down by me or being “blessed by me.” It was just too much pressure. I felt that I regretted becoming Christian because I felt that maybe I’d be happier and maybe I’d love myself and people more if I didn’t have a gauge for what a “good” person really was. So I escaped, in my own way. And yes, when you think of religious rebellion, you’d probably first think of sex, drugs, alcohol - which are, in my opinion, the only real sins of evangelical Christianity but let’s not forget bigotry, sexism, racism, greed, dishonesty, exploitation, and manipulation - all of which seemed to live rampantly, unchecked. But, yes, all three of these cardinal sins of Christianity are a part of my rebellion experience. It’s really strange, looking back at the last few years now. Remember how I mentioned I felt like some of my youth was tainted by this incredible pressure to be perfect? Well, in my mid-twenties I think I went out and was living the way I wanted to live my freshman year of college - hooking up with girls, doing drugs, partying, trying to be free. I think it’s because I suppressed all of those urges I felt in my younger years, and never gave myself the opportunity to form my own opinions about those things. So think about it - you’re a kid and you go to college and you see everyone else having an incredible time (or so it seems at that age). And at that time they seem more free than you, able to make mistakes, explore, and essentially do whatever they wanted without consequences. And then there’s you, and you’re not allowed to even want those things deep inside. and if you do want to explore those areas of life, you better not let anyone know. So what heppened with me was, after I left the church, I started fleshing out all of those questions. The real hard part about it thought was that the only people I knew were Christians, so I did most of it in absolute secret. And that really hurt me and a lot of people. But back to the plot: I feel that the real dark and painful elements of these departures are about deeper things. sexual promiscuity, drug abuse, all the “external” sins, to me, are just symptoms of deeper problems a soul is trying to work out - the questions of love, adequacy, safety, belonging. Those are the things we’re really after. And again, I want to spare everyone the details (if you want to talk more I’ll talk with you no problem, basically if you are a christian and think of everything “worldly,” I was probably involved in in some way or another), but to sum up my rebellion with this one word: inconsequence. I wanted to live a life of no consequence, again, trying to escape all the pressure of being a “world changer” a “mouthpiece of God” or even a “good person.” I had no idea what any of that was anymore. This led me down a dark path of faithlessness, spiritual anarchy, and ultimately complete and utter loneliness.
I believe in the dynamic of reaping and sewing. It’s a mystery to me, but I believe life gives you back what you put into its soil. For a long time it seemed, I really sewed into myself - I sewed into pleasure, I sewed into personal gain, I sewed into protecting myself and getting what I wanted, I wanted to do me. I wanted to be FMBM. FOR ME BY ME. and I think what happened, after a while, is I reaped the harvest from that time of my life. It’s so hard to explain, but it just felt off. Everything did. I felt like I had lost my way completely in my life. I had so many secrets, I had so many things to hide, that I never felt like myself. I didn’t even know who myself was. I never felt like me. Free, happy, funny, goofy, loving, and caring me. And that’s why the blog has been so silent, I didn’t know how to share these things with you, or even admit them to myself.
But then, slowly and with the help of people I can only describe as angels in my life, I started to find my way back. back to where? I actually have no idea. but back to something healthy I guess. Back to something faithful, hopeful, and maybe that’s God. If I were really honest, I’m still finding my way back. I feel like I’m at the beginning of this journey now - of finding God again, of finding myself again, and rediscovering the real meaning of life. I can’t quite pinpoint what it was that helped me realize how lost I really was, and how dark my world and my heart had become. I think what woke me up was losing a lot of things I loved. I hurt people I loved, I lost relationships that I deeply cared about, and in a sense I feel like I lost a lot of my sense of purpose and power. What saddens me even now is that the people I want to read this the most likely aren’t reading this blog anymore. My heart is broken. I feel like I’ve lost part of my soul. I’ve lost a lot of confidence and belief in myself. My choices have undermined my place to stand, and I find myself now, sifting through the pieces of my broken life, slowly replacing and repositioning its cornerstone.
I am challenging myself to be honest in the middle of this process with you. So often, we want to share our experiences after we have won the battles… but I really think that we need to start being honest in the middle of our processing, however ugly it is. Life is madly complicated. If there is anything I’ve realized, it’s that we are all actually really broken, some people just hide it more than others. I’m not the first person to have the experience that I have had - actually a lot of people have. The problem is, if you are involved in a Christianity that is remotely similar to mine, the fear of being judged and persecuted by your own people keeps you silent and ultimately keeps you alone in your struggle. You feel like you need to hide because this kind of conversation is not yet accepted nor taught within the church. I have had too many conversations with too many people to hide my story, because my story is actually all of our stories, and I believe that if we were to create a true space of unconditional love and dialogue, we might have the tools to actual work out our traumas with the church and find the true God through all of its bullshit.
Escaping To Where?
I wanted to title this writing “Escaping Christianity” because to me, it really sums up this process. There is a critical point where we need to leave a system in order to find the truth. I had to ask the terrifying question, “is it possible that the Christianity I know is drastically far from the real truth? The real Christ?.” For me, I haven’t given up on the idea of God, or the idea of Jesus, or the incredible truths I have observed in Jesus’ life. It’s just that I think God is going to turn out to be a lot different from what everyone, including me, claims He is. That’s all. That’s the mystery of life and the mystery of God.
If you are in this chapter of life, I want to encourage you. I’ve had countless, countless, countless conversations. Everyone my age seems to be escaping their Christianity in some way or another. Something has gone terribly wrong. So many people are hurt, traumatized and abused by Christianity. Sometimes I wonder if we will ever really recover from our experiences at all. My observation in most of these conversations, though, is that most people are stuck in the anger phase of the process, the tearing down, if you will. There is a lot of bitterness, anger, even hate towards the people and places that represented Jesus, but failed. And while I believe the anger chapter of this journey is necessary, it breaks my heart to see people camp out there without any sense of hope of moving forward. Being stuck in this place, to me, is not far from hell - dark, hopeless, fruitless, faithless. This is where I was over these last few years, I understand its darkness. I understand the feeling of not knowing where to go and only feeling anger. But, if there is one thing I desire to see out of all this writing, sharing and blogging, is that we might discover a way out without needing to leave God altogether - I’ve done that too and that’s hell too. I want to sit with all of you and say and believe with you - there is a way through this. I’m living the very first moments of the other side and its so free and so beautiful, just keep walking.
I don’t know how this looks or anything, I just have this deep desire to start some sort of dialogue. You need to share your story. You need to voice your experience, and let people affirm it. You need people who will see your pain and who will both dignify it and challenge you forward through it. We have all been hurt. Our experiences vary yes, and there are some unimaginable circumstances when it has come to spiritual and religious abuse and traumas - but I have a desire to see my generation forgive these experiences and build something better for our future. We have a lot of work to do - painful, real, but critical work.
This post was a little all over the place, but I’m believing that there is a purpose in some of these words. I would like to try something. If you are with me, and see me, would you share some of your experience with escaping christianity with me in a comment below? I’ve never tried this before, but I just want to read your story and say that I see you and I get it. and maybe this thread will become a place for everyone else to read everyone else’s stories. And we might all realize, oh wow this is so real and so important. It’s not me that’s defective, or my church, or my old pastor… it’s everyone. Be as honest as you can be. You don’t have to go calling out people by name or anything like that, and I don’t want this to be some cancel-fest of people or churches. also I’m not a counselor nor do I believe im the person to help you through it - I wouldn’t know how I’d do that other than just being real with my story. I am more interested in your experience and your affirmation. It’s not actually about the specific people and places that have failed you, it’s actually about learning the deep and unending layers of forgiveness and taking responsibility of your experience and your own life. and ultimately, I don’t want the residual hurts of other people’s pain and failures dictate your future. do not give them that satisfaction.
if you’re with me, let me know. Let me know your story. write it. I’m interested, and I’m thinking that A LOT of people reading this feel the same way. comment anonymously, send an email to me, talk to your friends, it’s whatever. I just want to get everyone to start talking.
If there is a lot of resonance with this post, I’d like to continue writing about the nuances of the idea of “escaping christianity” to continue the conversation and create a resources for anyone in this stage of life to move forward. Even if it is an inch a day.
I really do mean this when I write this now, but you are very loved and what you have experienced really matters. And I’m sorry for all the pain, it’s just how this world is. It’s full of people with very limited perspectives and limited tools. But I think, as we take steps towards the truth, we might see that it actually does set us free.
Love you guys. Andrew
