Deconstructing from Christianity: a Roadmap
What it actually looks like to burn it down and rebuild.
I’ve told my story before so I’m not going to retell it here in full. If you want the longer version, it’s in my last post 😜.
The short version is: fifteen years inside evangelical Christianity, a marriage I stayed in longer than I should’ve, a company I built while slowly falling apart inside, forced hospitalizations I never saw coming, and a collection of haphazard psychiatric diagnoses that kept shifting depending on who I was sitting in front of that week.
What I want to talk about here is what actually happens inside a person when they spend years inside a fear-based belief system… and then try to find their way out of it.
Because I’ve now talked to enough people going through this to know that “the details” are different but the architecture is almost always the same.
And nobody is mapping that architecture out honestly.
So let’s do that.
First you have to understand what the religious framework actually installed into you.
Not the surface stuff like “I went to church and now I feel guilty sometimes.” I mean the deep structural stuff that got in before you were old enough to question it.
Evangelical Christianity, at its doctrinal core, teaches that you were born cosmically wrong.
Fundamentally, irreparably wrong. So wrong, in fact, that a perfectly loving God couldn’t even tolerate your existence without someone being violently executed sacrificed on your behalf first.
And even after the execution, even after you’ve accepted the “gift” of it, you’re still being watched. Your thoughts can be sinful. Your desires are suspect. Your heart is, as the scripture goes, deceitful above all things.
God loves you infinitely… but you deserve death. God forgives you, sure. But only because of the blood.
Washed in the blood. Covered by the blood. Saved by the blood of the lamb. (so. much. blood 🤢)
When you step outside of it for a second, start actually hearing what the words are saying and notice how violent and visceral it actually is.
The central story of the “faith” of Christianity is a brutal execution… an outpouring of blood that a loving God allegedly required in order to tolerate you. That’s the foundation that everything else is built on.
For a sensitive, perfectionistic person who takes things seriously and actually tries to be good, that foundation creates effectively zero peace. It just creates a gnarly thought-loop.
Guilt. Repentance. Temporary relief. Repeat.
What about the minor detail of I don’t want to be covered in blood?!
With the baseline always being you are not enough (and you never will be!) on your own.
That loop runs silently in the background for years. Decades sometimes. And because it’s been there since before you had the language to describe it, it stops feeling like fear and starts feeling like just… you. It’s just your “personality.” Like the way you are.
Joe Dispenza in his book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself talks about how you become addicted to the emotions and state of being “you.” It’s familiar and it’s what we’re used to feeling.
But none of that default anxiety is actually the way you are!!! It’s just what got programmed in by religion.
The question that cracked it open for me was simple.
If God is love, and love keeps no record of wrongs, why would God require a blood payment for a debt he’s not keeping a record of?
(Unless it’s not actually God who’s demanding payment?)
I sat with that question for a long time before I let myself actually think freely about it. And once I did I couldn’t un-think it. The God I’d experienced didn’t match the God I’d been taught to fear at all.
That gap became impossible to close.
I want to be really clear here because I know how easy it is to misread what I’m saying. I’m not sitting here thinking everyone who believes this is wrong or deluded or damaged (although it’s definitely possible and even likely based on my experience). I believed it for over a decade. Most people inside it are sincere. Many find real comfort in the community and the structure. I understand why.
But the question that matters isn’t whether the people inside it are good people. Most of them are. The question is what the psychological structure of the doctrine itself does to the nervous system over time.
And the answer, for a lot of us, is: a lot. It does a lot.