I grew up in the church, and became a Christian when I was a young kid, not because I understood what I was doing, but because I heard from the teacher that those who weren’t Christians were going to spend the rest of eternity eternally separated from god and everything that came with that.

I have six siblings and I was at the age where being left alone was the most terrifying thing ever, so I decided to convert. I spent the rest of my childhood to early teen years in the church, and then my parents left the church because the pastor was having an affair and once it was found out by the elders they didn’t want to remove him from his position. For a couple years we did home church, but then there were issues with that and it just devolved into a situation where we were basically in a cult.

In late 2018, I went to a super religious Christian school in Minnesota, and it was difficult in a lot of different ways, but the religion of it all was getting to me a bit. All my classmates wanted to be missionaries because the main focus of the school was to make missionaries and send them out. I didn’t want to be a missionary because one of the things the school talked about was how glorious it was to die for Jesus which further turned me off to being a missionary because I liked living. In early 2020, I was evacuated back to my home state of Colorado and finished my sophomore year via zoom.

One of the things sophomore students were required to do was be in a course about fundraising to go overseas for a work study thing but also for ministry. As I tried to raise funds the people I would talk to mentioned how it wasn’t a good idea to go overseas during a pandemic, which I started thinking about in depth on my own. Finally, I decided to stay in the states, and in August of 2020 my classmates went overseas, spurred on by faculty who needed missionaries more than they valued the health of others.

After that, things fell apart for me belief wise. And it’s been okay since then, I’ve been deconstructing since 2020 and it’s an ongoing process. The work is sometimes painful but also really enlightening at the same time.

In terms of how I’m doing now I’m okay, I haven’t attended church in a while, and I don’t listen to worship music at all as I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all super hypocritical if we’re gonna leave the least of these out in the cold but then sing a bunch of songs about how god is so great and how he deserves everything when the religion centered around him is so abusive and selfish and bigoted.

Deconstruction is an ongoing process and I think at some point I’ll have built something better, but right now, it’s a step by step, day by day process