Dealing with Post-Christianity Depression

I’d like to take some time to detail my experiences that I have had since leaving the Christian faith. Hopefully this will reach beyond mere personal, subjective experience and actually provide some instruction for those who are struggling with things similar to this.

I recorded a two part Youtube series detailing my experiences, which you can watch if you’re too ADD to read the whole post :

Post-Christianity Depression Part 1: A Cosmic Hangover

Post-Christianity Depression Part 2: Death

A NICE LIFE

I grew up in a Christian home. In fact, most of my family is still Christian. And by “Christian” I mean “crazy Christian.” I know that will offend some, but there’s really no other way to describe it. I was (and they still are) really, really devoted. My family, in case you’re curious, was the fundamentalist protestant Christian type; we attended Calvary Chapel (my parents still do) and we were hardcore “creationists.”

I went to church several times a week, read my Bible and prayed A LOT, and went on mission trips. My mom told me the other day that, when I was a little kid, whenever they didn’t know where I was, they knew I was in my room reading my Bible — slightly abnormal for a kid of that age. Especially during the past five years, I was at the real height of my devotion. Today, I still respect their religious devotion very much, but I ended up walking away from their faith for several reasons.

My great grandmother, who was like a mother to me my whole life, died from cancer a few months ago. Her loss was really, really hard on me. Additionally, she wasn’t a “Christian” like I was. I think she was Catholic at one point in time, but she hadn’t been to any kind of church in a loooong time. Now that I think of it, she never really talked about God at all either.

This of course, in “Christian-speak,” meant that she was going to Hell. This was very, very difficult for me to process, and so I began to ask myself “Why?” Why is she going to hell? Why would God do something like that? Why is it that someone like my great grandmother could be so loving and still end up in hell?

In short, I came to the conclusion that, essentially, she was going to hell because someone in the New Testament of the Bible said so. The identity of that “someone,” though, for the first time in my life, was now up for question. I had always believed that it was “God” who wrote the New Testament through several secretaries. Suddenly, I began to question whether it was really just a few crackpot secretaries making stuff up about God.

I quickly set out on a quest to find out whether the Bible was really the word of God. The quest took me through a significant amount of skeptical literature both online and offline, and, at the end, my faith was totally compromised. (It does now seem a bit sad that a month’s worth of skeptical literature was enough to demolish all the arguments I had been exposed to over the course of my life in several different churches and hundreds of books and articles of apologetic literature.)

The two most significant books that really destroyed my faith were The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine and Bible Prophecy: Failure or Fulfillment? by Tim Callahan. I must admit, the first book created a sort of man-crush for Thomas Paine deep down inside me (that’s also probably why I became a Deist, but more about that in a later post). Anyway, after those two books, I was no longer a Christian.

COSMIC HANGOVER

And after that, I became suuuuuuper depressed. The effect may have been compounded due to my grandmother’s recent death, but a significant portion came from leaving my faith.

Suddenly, there wasn’t this all-powerful Father figure in the sky watching my every move and waiting to whisk me away to paradise when I die. Reality can be a real shocker. Also, it was such a shock to realize that everything I had believed and experienced my whole life was a delusion or a lie. Talk about depressing. Even today, there is still very much nostalgia left over in my mind for my experiences with Christianity, especially since most of this experience was shared with my dad (with whom I am still very close, and whom I still love and respect very much). Really, I felt as though I was experiencing a hangover of cosmic proportions.

So I was stuck with this depression, and it had to be dealt with. But how would I deal with it? My first solution was to take advantage of Pascal’s Wager and just “choose” to go back to Christianity. I thought, “Meh, sure it might be BS, but ignorance is bliss, right?” However, I quickly concluded that Pascal’s wager is a joke.

Apart from the fact that Pascal’s wager is worse than buying a lottery ticket (at least you know the odds when you buy a lottery ticket — nobody really knows the odds when it comes to God’s existence), the premise that you can “choose” what to believe is really nonsense.

Could I just choose what to believe? Could I just sit down and say to myself a thousand times “I believe in the God of the Bible,” and then believe it? Of course not. We don’t choose what we believe. We believe what we believe because we’re convinced by something to believe what we believe. And since I have quite exhausted the available evidence pertaining to the divine inspiration of the Bible, I could never consciously decide to “believe” something which I know is really false.

THE CEMETERY

After that, I realized that the only way to deal with my depression was to face reality — specifically, death. That’s right, the big one. And what better way to deal with that than to go to the cemetery. (I suppose it was rather convenient with my grandmother’s recent death as it gave me an excuse to go to the cemetery….I’m sorry, that’s really not funny at all, is it?).

I went to the cemetery and looked at all of the graves. The one that I went to was very large and very old. I went to the oldest part of the cemetery where there were graves from the early 1800’s. There was even a guy buried there who was from the Revolutionary War. Wow.

At first, this made me even more depressed. Many of these graves were clearly no longer visited. Some of the names had even worn off completely. There were also probably a great number whose occupants were completely forgotten. Perhaps they didn’t even have any living relatives. Pretty depressing, isn’t it? I came to the conclusion that, in the end, just as their lives were purposeless, so are our lives.

If you think about it, someday we’ll all be in their position. Even Shakespeare, despite all his literary glory, will someday be completely forgotten. As you can imagine, I was really, really, REALLY sad.

But, oddly, this also gave life a new purpose for me. Though I was before depressed about life’s seeming “purposelessness” upon leaving Christianity, because of this experience, I am now able to look at life and see purpose in every direction. Does that sound like a paradox? Let me explain.

I came to terms with death in a way that I never did when I was a Christian. I always thought the real experience came AFTER death. You know? But I now realize that the real experience is here and now. We aren’t guaranteed an afterlife. Though there may be an afterlife, there may just as well not be.

Doesn’t this mean that we must work and strive to create our purpose right now? Now…I feel like I don’t want to die without having contributed something to mankind. No. I don’t feel like I want to—I feel like it is my duty to do so.

I guess that sounds a bit cheesy, but I can truly say that life seems a whole lot brighter now that I have finally come to terms with reality. I can’t say that your experience, if you are a former Christian, will mirror mine exactly, but I do hope that your experience will be, in the end, just as positive!

Are you a former Christian? Are you struggling with life after Christianity? I’d love to hear your thoughts!