We are all the sum total of all the paths we have trodden to get to this point. Our worldviews are loaded with baggage that we have gathered along the way. More often than we might admit, this baggage is invisible to us. It silently primes our reactions to insights and any new information that might challenge it.
None of us are blank slates.
For this reason I want to begin this blog by describing my journey with the hope that I will make my own baggage more visible: both to you and to me.
Baby steps
I’ve always been a people-pleaser, and no less so than when my mum started bringing me to church at a very early age. For her own reasons she plunged deeply into the dogma and theology of our church. To please and to earn praise I gladly followed with equal passion. I was very young — not even ten years old — but I dived in as far as my immature brain could understand.
Twice on a Sunday and once on a Wednesday, during the most foundational years of my life, you would find me at some sort of church service. Prayer meetings, Sunday services, Sunday school. Once or twice a year saw me walking the streets with my mum, earnestly pushing religious flyers into the letterboxes of local houses. A high-achiever at school and a precociously early reader, I read the Bible cover-to-cover before entering my teens. Looking back, I can’t quite remember the way in which I understood everything that was presented to me. I doubt that it had much nuance. But I do remember that I believed with an intense fervour.
For me, Protestant Christianity was the definition of correct. Anything or anyone that said otherwise was at best misled, and at worst the incarnation of Satan himself.
But the message of this church was not one that someone like me should ever have been exposed to, especially at that age. Steeped in a cold and unforgiving form of evangelical presbyterianism, the fundamental teaching that my immature mind heard was, in short:
You are not good enough, and you never will be good enough.
Although almost 40 years have passed, I still vividly remember the evening I went downstairs in tears, desperately looking for my mum. “I don’t think I am a Christian!”, I wailed. This was not some early confession of atheism. No, it was the abject fear of a child who had bought into the truth offered by this church, and believed in his heart and in his soul that he would burn for eternity. Although my mum reacted as the saint she has always been, sitting me down for a reassuring chat and a prayer, this shows not only the damage that was being done to me, but also illustrates the dire circumstances of her own mental health. Not for one second did she consider that my spiritual education might be doing more harm than good. Not for an instant did she consider leaving the church.
The light of grace
A year or so later — I was perhaps ten at the time — I had the first major spiritual experience of my life. In the words of the elders of my church, the spirit had descended on me. I was saved. Even though I was a child, this was as real of a mystical experience as I have had since. I might use different vocabulary to describe it than I did back then, but I still believe today that this was a genuine moment of grace.
On hearing this my delighted mum took me to see the pastor, who responded with compassion and positivity. I still remember him gifting my a verse from the Gospels that was to be mine: Romans 8:31.
If God is for us, who can be against us?
This minister welcomed me into a wider world with a sense of empathy and thoughtfulness that still touch me all these years later. He genuinely cared about my spiritual health, and made me feel that my experience truly was worthwhile. Together with my mum, he was one of the few shining lights in that church. I am still grateful to him today.
Despite this moment of grace, my time spent in that church was not good for me. The dogmatic literalism was unhealthy for my developing curiosity — a significant fraction of our time in Sunday school was spent being taught pithy take-downs to use in case anyone suggested a belief in “Darwinism” — and clashed more and more with my natural interest in science. Even worse, the self-hatred and “YOU’RE ALL SINNERS!” messaging was leaving deep wounds, traces of which still survive today as irremovable parts of my personality.
But as an unbearably keen people-pleaser and a child just starting to move into my teens, I was blithely unaware of any of this. All I knew was how to get the praise I sought from my mum by being the most devout and fundamentalist Christian I could be. Nothing could change for me if it wasn’t instigated by her. And so the faith-destroying crisis that erupted into her life was perfectly shaped to collapse my worldview into something radically different.
I stepped off the cliff.
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