· Why I Left the Church…and What I’ve Come to Understand About Christianity
For a long time, I tried to make myself stay. I tried to be the version of me that fit inside the church. I tried to quiet the questions. I tried to override what my body and heart were telling me by telling myself that discomfort meant conviction, and doubt meant weakness.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was also learning how to feel ashamed of myself. Not loud, obvious shame. But the quiet kind, the kind that lives in the body. The kind that whispers, “Something is wrong with you.” The kind that makes you monitor your thoughts, your desires, your doubts, and your impulses as if they are evidence against you.
At first, I told myself I was just leaving the church…the institution, the culture, the politics, the personalities. And that was true. But over time, I realized the separation went deeper than that. What I was actually stepping away from was Christianity as I had come to know and practice it.
Because beneath the language of love, I had internalized a framework that taught me, often subtly, that I was fundamentally broken, suspect, or in need of constant correction. That my inner world couldn’t be trusted without external authority. That my body, my instincts, and my questions were things to be managed rather than listened to.( that we sinners and was born in Sin - which is untrue)
That does something to a person.
It creates a low-grade, ever-present shame-(& guilt…)not because you’re doing something wrong, but because being yourself feels like a liability.
Here’s the part that matters most to say clearly:
I didn’t leave because I stopped believing in Yeshua (Jesus).
I believe he existed. I believe he modeled a way of being that was deeply loving, grounded, embodied, and transformational. His life points toward compassion over judgment, presence over performance, and inner transformation over external compliance.
But at some point, I had to admit something uncomfortable:
Much of what we call Christianity today isn’t actually centered on living the way he lived, it’s centered on believing the correct things about him.
And when belief becomes the primary measure of belonging, shame becomes the silent regulator.
You start measuring yourself constantly:
Am I pure enough? Faithful enough? Submitted enough? Certain enough?
Doubt becomes danger. Curiosity becomes disobedience. And the very parts of you that might lead to growth, your questions, your sensitivity, your lived experience, get labeled as problems to fix.
Since stepping away, what I’ve found isn’t emptiness. It’s relief. A loosening in my body. A quieting of that background hum that told me I was always one misstep away from being wrong.
A return to self-trust.
I’ve found a sense of connection that doesn’t disappear when I ask hard questions. A morality rooted in empathy instead of fear. A relationship with the sacred that feels direct, alive, and spacious enough to hold all of me,not just the acceptable parts.
So when people ask if I’ll ever go back, the honest answer is:
It’s unlikely.
Not because I’m angry. Not because I think I’m above it. But because I can’t unknow what shame felt like in my body, or what its absence feels like now.
I can’t return to a framework that taught me to mistrust myself. And I can’t pretend that something which quietly fractured me should feel like home again.
This isn’t an attack. It’s an acknowledgment of completion.
If you’re still in the church or within Christianity and it feels alive and nourishing for you, I genuinely respect that. This isn’t about convincing anyone to leave. It’s about naming my own path out loud, because I know how isolating it can be to realize that the thing that once gave you meaning is also the thing that taught you to feel ashamed of who you are.
I didn’t lose faith. I didn’t lose love. I didn’t lose meaning.
I lost shame.
And in doing so, I found something deeper asking me to trust myself..(Love.)
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