Notes on deconversion from the corner booth of a quiet bar
I'll pick up the tab because we're probably gonna be here a while
As I write, it’s the week of Spring Equinox. It’s hard to keep track of the seasons where I live - Florida’s “gateway to the tropics” - but this morning’s brisk fifty degree chill felt very much like the cusp of springtime.
The timing is right, the energy is right, the momentum is right to finally put all of the pieces (well, as many of the pieces as I can gather) into one place to tell the story of my deconversion from Christianity to … whatever label someone might apply to me now. Religious None? Secular Spiritualist? Woo-woo Weirdo? I don’t know what to call myself now, and tbh, I don’t worry over that too much.
As my story unfolds, I think you’ll see why I cannot in good conscience refer to myself as a Christian anymore though I still read the Bible and believe in God. (If you haven’t yet read it, my friend Sarah Bessey recently wrote a fiery, stunning essay Are We Still Calling Ourselves Christians? that is an essential read for anyone navigating what it means to be a Christian in the theological fever dream that is 2025.) An increasing number of readers and friends have reached out to gently ask if there’s anywhere I’ve told the whole story of how this spiritual turn came to be, and prior to this, I’ve only dropped pieces of the puzzle here and there.
Last week, I discovered a feature on Substack that allows writers to reach out via email to specific segments of their subscribers. I sent out a quick note to the most engaged readers of Gemini Wrongs, and told them I was planning to finally start this series, and I asked if they might have any questions on this topic that might help guide my hand as I organize my thoughts. I mentioned that this has been a challenge for me to structure because it’s a conversation best shared over late-night glasses of wine in a corner booth of a restaurant where the server hovers at a respectful distance as intimate conversation tumbles out.
One of my readers emailed back that this was exactly the approach I should take. Write like we are seated across from each other, just talking it out.
And you know what? That seems exactly right because, listen, I’m no theologian. I’ve never claimed to be. I do not know now nor have I ever known how to talk about finer points of theology. I’m a Big Picture girl at heart. And I’m a yapper, you know this. My Jupiter in Gemini placement grants me an endless curiosity that is completely content to keep adapting, changing, growing, and learning.
I have no idea how long this series will go. I’m just going to start writing where I think the conversation would take us, me and you. So let’s settle in to our booth, just enough music and hum of people talking to create a cocoon of privacy around us, face-to-face in-person connection dialed up to peak enjoyment.
Drinks are on me.
You: So tell me about this big deconstruction!
Me: Wellllll, I don’t really even call it that. I actually really went through “deconstruction” back in the 2010s. Like, if we looked at the Evangelical deconstruction movement in waves like we look at the feminist movement, I think I’m first wave? I’m a “Farewell, Rob Bell”1 and Jen Hatmaker In Her 72 Era deconstructionist. laughs
You: Oh! So like Pre-Trump?
Me: Oh hell yes! Pre-Trump for SURE. God, don’t you remember that Easter weekend of 2016, I released a Sorta Awesome episode that was initially titled like “Why I hate Christianity” or something insane like that?
You: laughing OH MY GOD, I completely forgot about that! The outrage! The fury!
Me: It was a wild take in 2016. I like to think I was just five years ahead of my time. She’s a trendsetter!
You: She’s a trailblazer!
Me: still laughing Good times. But yeah, by 2016, I had almost burned through almost all of my fury at what Christianity had morphed into in the USA. I was still pretty angry, but by then, my anger had turned into just a deep, deep grief. I think my deconstruction started with questioning why I was allowed at the age of five - five years old! Niko’s age! - to make this huge decision to be baptized, to “ask Jesus into my heart”3 or whatever, when I barely had an understanding of what being a Christian was, like what it would mean. I didn’t even know what being a human meant! I had a lot of anger around the fact that I “made a decision to follow Christ” after hearing a revival preacher include a story in his sermon of a little girl who accidentally stepped in front of a taxi? And died instantly, and sort of used that as a way of emphasizing that we better knew where we would go if we died that night and if we didn’t know for sure, than chances were that we were headed to hell.
This was my first introduction to the afterlife, mind you.
You: Okaaayyyy. Intense.
Me: But so yeah, the idea of hell and eternal torment for the untold millions of people who didn’t “walk the aisle and pray the prayer”4 really fucked me up as a kid. I would lay in bed at night and cry and pray for a long time for all the people who didn’t know Jesus. I remember I would just pray over and over again, “God, please forgive every person in the world for every sin.”
You: Awwwwww, that’s sad!
Me: Right?? The eternal salvation of every human on the planet is a lot for a kid to carry. So yeah, when Rob Bell dared to suggest that Love Wins and that hell might not be literal, I think it was the first time I realized that I could actually question this concept that had just bothered me for, like, my whole sentient life!
You: So, the politics of it all wasn’t really a factor for you, like for deconstructing?
Me: Well, that came later. laughs But in the beginning, it was more of a questioning of, like, how do I grapple with a religion that has some pretty big issues that I just cannot agree to? And actually, it’s kind of funny because I don’t even remember what I was so mad about when I did that podcast episode in 2016, because yeah, that was pre-Trump. Hmmmmmm. I know it was connected to the stuff Jen writes about in 7.
If I am recalling correctly at all, I think the biggest issue for me was how so little of American Christianity focused on living like Jesus and most of it was focused on sin management - like managing our own sin and the sins of others. Yeah. I think that was the crux of my many issues.
You: Riiiiiiight. So to get away from the idea of hell and also worry less about sin, you … became Catholic?
Me: WHAT A GREAT USE OF FREE WILL, right?? Okay, so here’s how the Catholic Church plays into all of this …
TO BE CONTINUED
She loves a cliffhanger,
Meg
Amazon tells me I purchased a paperback copy of this book on January 15, 2012
Where you read quotation marks, please know I’m liberally using air quotes
Meg, I cannot wait to read the rest of this story. I think I discovered you because of the how-to Pinterest post you wrote that went viral back in 2011 or so. You were not the kind of person/writer I thought of as my people. You were a very Christian Christian raising small children in the middle of the country somewhere, and I was a recovering Catholic atheist raising teenagers in the northwest. But there was something in you that spoke to me, and you were the first person I'd have put in the category of super-Christian (which probably means evangelical) to make me realize that not all super-Christians were alike. Through you, I discovered others who were not the kind of Christian I'd come to fear and dislike, and I remember telling some friends that there were Christians writing online who seemed to understand what Jesus was really about and some were even feminists. 🙂 I remember really liking a series you did about Lent, and you welcomed me to participate even though I was not religious at all. Life is so funny, how we change through the course of it. Last November, to the astonishment of everyone close to me, I started attending a neighborhood Christian church because for 6 years I've been loving their reader board messages of inclusion and activism (and also their work to open a tiny house village in their parking lot for some of the most vulnerable unhoused folks in our city), and the election got me past my social anxiety enough to finally go check them out. I've finally found a church who sees love and worship and faith as actions more than beliefs. And who take the words and example of Jesus pretty seriously. It's a small, funky little congregation, but when they say each week that whoever we are and wherever we are on life's journey, we're welcome--they mean it. Like a 12-step group, they seem to let each person define God as makes sense to them. The pastor was raised in the kind of faith community you were, and he references his experiences often. I am so glad to see you writing about what happened to you, and what the impact was. I am so glad for you that you're finding your way to a spiritual practice that is a good fit. For whatever it's worth, I could see the seeds of it in you 15 or so years ago. I think you and I, who still look so different from each other on the surface, have core values in common. Wouldn't it be wonderful if more of us could see that in each other?
This is a Fantastic way yo write this out! And my heart breaks for tiny Meg crying for all the other people on the planet. What a terrible, scary way to be introduced to God! Especially for a sensitive child.
One of the things that is so annoying about American Evangelicals is that they just describe themselves as "Christian" and assume that their (narrow, and sometimes literally heretical *cough* dispensationalism *cough*) interpretations are "biblical" (they are often not) and that they are "the Truth" and anyone who does not agree with them is "not a real Christian". It just discounts centuries and centuries of theological and philosophical wrestling and the earnest Faithfulness of millions of non-American, non-Evangelical people. The arrogance of it all is astounding. And this is how, of course things eventually go so completely off the rails.