Leaving My Childhood Faith
Vivian
“I am living out some of the priorities I learned from Christianity, such as the Golden Rule and Jesus’ ethic of neighbor love. But I am not doing so because the Bible says I should or because Jesus says so or because I have my sins forgiven or because I’m afraid of hell. They are self-evidently good.”
Edited by Cliff Williams from an interview with Vivian on August 20, 2026. "Vivian" and "Kevin" are pseudonyms.
Childhood
My dad was born in an Asian country, and my mom was born in the US. So when my parents started a relationship, they had to deal with cultural differences. The things that seemed normal to my mom didn’t seem normal to my dad, and vice versa. They wanted to have a culture that was not based in either Eastern or Western culture, but one that was based in Christian culture, because they were both Christians. As an adult, I came to believe that there is no such thing as Christian culture because it is always situated in some kind of human culture. But when I was a child, my parents told me that they were raising me in a distinctively Christian culture.
I was homeschooled, and we protested when there were potential laws that would make homeschooling more restrictive. We volunteered at a crisis pregnancy center where they gave ultrasounds to pregnant women to try to convince them to keep their pregnancies. Whenever my parents talked about homosexuality, it was always in a nervous and shame-based way: “Oh, I need to tell you that there’s this really dark thing in the world when sometimes two men try to be in a relationship together, and God doesn’t like that.” They taught us children what the Bible says, though we learned about other religious beliefs as well. That was done so that we could prove them wrong or teach their adherents the right way, not as a viable option.
For a long time, my family did Sunday church services at our dining room table, like the early church did when Christians met at homes without a paid pastor. We had printed out photocopies of some of our favorite hymns. One of us played a little harp, and mom played the flute. Then my dad had us talk about some passage of the Bible.
I remember feeling so confused when we read the passage about how women should wear head coverings. We were supposed to follow the Bible, but women didn’t wear head coverings. I didn’t think my parents had a satisfactory answer to that. I had a lot of trust in them, so I thought maybe I just didn’t understand.
My homeschooling had a thread of appreciation for intellectual reasoning and critical thinking. We read the novels of Dostoevsky and Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, the Western canon. We talked about them and were taught to organize our thoughts and write persuasive essays. We had a Latin club and a drama club. At eleven, I started doing competitive speech and debate.
On one of the evening walks my mom and I went on, I asked her why gay marriage was wrong and why we as a family voted for candidates who defined marriage as being between one man and one woman. She said that the natural order of things involved procreation, which happened only between a woman and a man. Also, she said, it was best for children if they had both a mother and a father because they would be deprived of certain developmental needs if the two parents were of the same gender. I didn’t find those answers very convincing. I was a teenager by then and felt as though I kept hitting a wall.
At the same time, I wanted my parents’ approval. They felt deeply responsible for teaching us children rightly. We were presented with a clear sense of right and wrong. They were helping us to think critically. And, my parents said, I was getting a better education than students in public schools were getting. They were, however, discouraging us from using our critical thinking on the Bible.
My older sister got us involved in an organization called Communicators for Christ. It had weeklong conferences, part of which were worship services. I felt very emotional when we sang songs about God’s greatness and glory with all the other Christians. Combined with reading and memorizing Bible verses at home and doing daily devotions, which my family encouraged, those services caused me to feel that I had a personal relationship with God.
That personal relationship was what we were supposed to have—being connected to Christ emotionally and sensing God’s spirit. And it was presumed that these would prompt us to do things. When I was fifteen or sixteen, there were times when I felt God putting it into my heart to witness to someone, to talk to some random stranger about what they believed and whether they were saved. I thought, “Oh, this is an opportunity in which I could talk to them about Jesus. I should do that even though it’s scary.”
High School
What eventually led to my breaking away from Christianity has to do with my relationship with Kevin, whom I am now married to. I met him when I was a sophomore in high school at the speech and debate tournaments we went to. He had a little notebook in which he wrote down quotes from books he was reading and questions he had about life. I thought that was really cool. So I got my own little notebook and started writing things in it. When we saw each other at the tournaments, we’d exchange the notebooks and talk about stuff we were thinking about. We called the little notebooks “commonplace books.”
At home, we emailed each other. We talked about what T. S. Eliot meant in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He got me into different musicians and made me a tape with the Wallflowers, U2, and Snow Patrol on it.
My parents, though, thought it was not honoring to God for teenagers to have romantic relationships. Your sole focus should be on pursuing God’s goals and focusing on your education and preparing for whatever your calling would be. To them, teenage relationships were a distraction because at sixteen you’re not anywhere close to being able to get married. You’re putting your energy into a relationship that’s probably immature and probably not going to lead to anything long-term.
My mom had the password to my email account and she checked my email periodically. When she saw the extent of the emails Kevin and I had and saw that we were saying, “I love you,” to each other, she got worried. She and my dad both felt this was not appropriate.
So they took steps to curtail the relationship. They set limits on how many minutes a week I could chat with Kevin on Google Chat. They said I couldn’t email him first, because the principle of male headship meant that when you have a friendship with a boy, you have to let the boy take the lead. They said I couldn’t say, “I love you,” to him.
I care about my parents a lot, and I’m grateful for the energy and care they gave to me. But their opposition to my relationship with Kevin caused me a great deal of pain. Still, I really, really wanted to do the right thing. So I often pushed Kevin away. I felt guilty talking to him and was very reserved around him. I resented the attention he was giving me, though at other times I appreciated that care and attention.
At some point, we stopped seeing each other, because I stopped doing debate. We began writing letters to each other and talking on the phone every two weeks. Our relationship withered, though, because I was trying hard to keep it within correct and orderly bounds, which made me feel that I was not being my real self with him. And I wasn’t allowed to rely on him, trust him, or confide in him, because my parents were so concerned about upholding the ideal of purity, protecting your heart, and not making promises to someone who is not your spouse.
As I was about to start college, I cut off the relationship with Kevin. I had internalized so much of what my parents had wanted that it seemed the only righteous thing to do.
The way all this relates to my faith journey is that after I stopped connecting with Kevin, I started to feel that I did not want a faith that says we should deny ourselves and give up the things that matter most to us.
The experiences I had with my family with respect to Kevin created in me the notion that Christianity means your ultimate loyalty is to God and you don’t get to care about what you want or need. Your desires don’t factor into the equation. Christianity was all about ignoring and sublimating your own desires and needs so that you could pursue holiness and righteousness as defined by the religious teachers my family followed.
That was basically self-denial. It felt to me like requiring a personal sacrifice for very ambiguous goals. It meant that I would have to cut off relationships that were important to me. I would have to protect institutions and ideologies rather than people, which I did not like one bit.
Beyond High School
Between eighteen and twenty-six, I had experiences of feeling that the Christian way involved ignoring your intellect, human experience, and what is good for human life.
When people say, “The Bible doesn’t really say you should ignore your intellect, human experience, or what is good for human life,” it is very confusing to me in the same way that it was confusing to be told, “We don’t actually follow the part of the Bible about women wearing head coverings.” That feels very pick and choose. Who decides which parts of the Bible you read literally and which ones you don’t, which ones you understand in context and which ones not?
During those eight years, I was still very invested in Christianity and I thought of myself as a Christian. I read my Bible. I volunteered at church. I was an usher once a month. Most of my friends were part of the church or were from the Christian college I had gone to. When Kevin and I married a year after we finished college, we gave ten percent or more of our income to the church or other Christian causes.
The church we went to was Anglican. I had felt lost and far away from God when I had earlier moved to the city it was in. I remember feeling, “This is so beautiful. I can walk into this church and feel accepted.” The services were about holiness and seeing and reflecting the beauty of Christ. Through the music and the stained glass windows and the care of the people there, I experienced a tangible grace. I sensed that God accepted me just as I was. Also, Anglicanism was more friendly to the life of the mind and to my interest in beauty than the fundamentalist Christianity I was raised in. So for a time, I felt closer to God than ever before. It was very appealing.
Work and Church
I worked for a few years on staff at the Christian college I went to. A number of things bothered me during those years. I became disillusioned with the way people policed one another within Christianity. I read mail from alumni about what the college was not doing right. I heard painful stories from students who had experienced racism and been the recipient of racial microaggressions. Some students believed that White American Christianity was being taught as the best way and that other cultures were being put down by various professors who taught about Western civilization. All of it grieved my heart.
I had to draft emails in which people in the administration explained why things had to be done a certain way or why they could not address student concerns. But I didn’t want to be on that side. I wanted to be on the side providing comfort and solace to those who had experienced hurt at the hands of the institution. I wanted to push for a world that uplifted and dignified people. It seemed to me that the college was exemplifying cultural supremacy and American exceptionalism. And I didn’t want to have anything to do with those.
The gay marriage issue came up again. A visiting speaker at our church said that the only way a same-sex attracted person could get married was to a person of the opposite sex. If you’re a woman, you have to marry a man even if you’re not attracted to him and don’t love him romantically. You should have a normal public-facing heterosexual marriage.
Then the speaker said, “You should not be associating with people who claim to be Christians and are gay and who are in a same-sex relationship.” To that, someone said, “Really? You should just cut them off?” The speaker doubled down and said, “Yes. If they’re claiming to be Christians and they’re not following God’s word, you shouldn’t be endorsing what they are doing with your continued relationship with them.”
Afterwards Kevin went to the pastor of our church and asked, “Do you actually think we should be doing that?” That was a poignant question for Kevin, because his sister is gay and is married to a woman. And his sister’s spouse has been cut off by her parents. They treat her like a complete outcast. But neither Kevin nor I would ever consider doing such a thing.
For so long, when I was doing the Christian thing and my employer was Christian and my friend circle was all Christian, I just thought, “There are going to be things I don’t understand. I need to bracket them out. I need to believe in the mysteriousness of God and simply trust that the Christian tradition has wisdom to it. God’s ways are higher than our ways, and we might not understand everything.”
But there came a point when I could no longer think that. Gay exclusion meant that gay Christians did not come to our church, and broader statistics and research showed that there were high rates of suicide among LGBTQ folks and being excluded from family and faith communities contributed to homelessness and suicidality. Plus, the lack of decisiveness about promoting racial equality was causing real harm to students of color at the college I was working for.
I know that not all Christians are anti-gay or indecisive about race, but it seems that those who care about reading and interpreting the Bible rightly, those who say we need to take the Bible seriously, end up with interpretations that promote gay exclusion or excuse racial harm.
The Bible
I began to have problems with the Bible. There are so many places in the Old Testament where God commanded Israel to wipe out entire peoples, which is genocide. People in the Christianity I was part of came up with reasons for this: “That had to happen because they were sacrificing children,” or “That’s the Old Testament. The New Testament doesn’t have the same thing.” For the passage in which it is said that a wife should submit to her husband because the man is the head of the woman as Christ is the head of the church, they said, “It doesn’t really mean submit. If you look at the Greek, it means something else.”
It seemed to me that people who wanted to promote women’s equality with men, racial equality, or pacifism were saying that the Bible doesn’t really mean what it seems to mean. That made me ask, “Are they paying attention to the word of God as their authority? Or are they using research, human experience, compassion, and science as their lens?” In every case it seemed that the people were putting science, empathy, and compassion higher than what the Bible said. So then I asked, “What is the point of using the Bible to determine what we should believe? What unique value is biblical guidance giving us?”
It struck me that the only way you could be a Christian and not contribute to the harm caused by objectionable passages was to cancel out those passages. The Bible would no longer be the source of one’s faith. It seemed much better just to say, “I fully affirm my gay and trans friends,” and not be beholden to a hurtful idea about how identity and relationships should look.
Leaving Christianity
During the COVID–19 pandemic in 2020, Kevin and I stopped going to church because we couldn’t. We did do some virtual services and some outdoor services that were socially distanced. Both of these provided breathing room for me to construct a community outside of my church community. That happened alongside of our trying to dialogue with our pastor about whether people in gay relationships would be allowed to take communion at the church. We didn’t feel that that got resolved.
Between ages twenty-six and twenty-eight, when we had our first two children and were going to church less, I still thought of myself as a Christian. To be a Christian meant, I was thinking, that you care about the creator God. And you care about pursuing the good, the true, and the beautiful.
After those two years, I realized that I didn’t believe that the only way to an afterlife was by confessing Jesus as Lord, and I didn’t have a fixed opinion about the existence of heaven or hell. I stopped believing in the Bible as inspired by God. I didn’t have a basis for believing that or for believing in the resurrection of Jesus. Maybe the resurrection happened. Maybe it didn’t. I couldn’t use research or science or compassion to make a judgment about it.
I recognized that I couldn’t call myself a Christian anymore, except in a very loose sense of being influenced by the Christian ethic. So I stopped calling myself one. That was four years ago.
I was also very depressed during that time, because having two kids is really hard and we didn’t have any family nearby to help out. Plus, we had a homeless friend who was dying of cancer. While these were happening, it was very confusing to sit with the fact that my faith wasn’t working for me, because Christianity had been such a source of meaning for me. I had gone to a Christian college. I did everything by the book with Kevin. I could hear God speaking to me at times. But it felt that the experiences I had within Christianity were within a limited data set. And when I let in other perspectives, I couldn’t believe Christianity anymore.
Three years ago, I went on a solo trip to another state for a friend’s wedding. It was the first time I had been away from my children for more than a night. I finally had some time on my own to think about things. I realized I still wanted to hold on to some aspects of faith, such as the feeling of closeness to God I had experienced as a teenager. I valued moments of transcendence and mystery.
These moments, however, now come to me through human connection, art, and nature. My life is extremely rich. I am close to Kevin’s lesbian sister and sister-in-law who live nearby. I see our neighbors a great deal. We share meals together. We watch each others’ kids. We are trying in small ways to take care of vulnerable people in our community, people whose family members have been kidnapped by ICE, and people who are unhoused. Life feels meaningful to me, because there is real value in caring for people at the margins of society.
I also make art. And I love experiencing other people’s art. These connect me to what is bigger than myself, and they shape the meaning of my life. With Christianity, meaning, art, and literature were clogged up with excuses for very restrictive policies. I got tired of the cognitive dissonance.
So I am living out some of the priorities I learned from Christianity, such as the Golden Rule and Jesus’ ethic of neighbor love. But I am not doing so because the Bible says I should or because Jesus says so or because I have my sins forgiven or because I’m afraid of hell. They are self-evidently good. And we are made to take care of one another.
Turning Points: Faith Journeys of Twenty-Five People