What if you didn't lose your faith?

A word from Father Tom

Can you relate to this feeling?

You gave everything your religious system asked of you — the attendance, the beliefs, the language, the rules and culture, your money — but somewhere along the way, it stopped working. Maybe it collapsed under the pain of life or the weight of real suffering.  Maybe it fell apart as the result of honest intellectual questions, or simple exhaustion. Perhaps you were hurt by the people who were supposed to represent God’s love.

Whatever happened, you walked away. And like me you probably thought you lost your faith.

But what if it was something completely different?

As my parish is probably tired of hearing, I grew up in a fundamentalist church and spent ten years as a minister in that tradition. I knew the Bible, at least well enough to win the occasional theological argument, and I had built my entire identity around that Fellowships very particular way of understanding God and Scripture.

Then everything suddenly fell apart. While completing a graduate degree in theology — where academic inquiry forced me to ask questions it felt like my tradition had no room for — my father fell and hit his head three days before my wedding. The injury eventually killed him. I was grieving, newly married, intellectually unmoored, and spiritually exhausted all at the same time. I lost my faith. At least, that’s how I felt.

It took years for me to understand that my academic work was dismantling my intellectual framework while grief was dismantling my emotional and existential one. I was exposed on every front simultaneously. It was unbearably painful. But looking back, I can only describe it as a kind of violent mercy — because what shattered was not really my faith in God. What shattered was an idol that had been wearing God’s face.

Legalistic groups and systems, whatever their denomination, tend to build a particular picture of divinity. It is a god of performance. A god who records debts and demands payment. A god who offers conditional tolerance based on how well you keep the rules, but no warmth, no tenderness, no initiative toward you.

You can obey such a god.

You can fear such a god.

...but it is very hard to love a god who has only ever tolerated you.

These systems also treat grace and the unconditional love and mercy of God, as something dangerous. Grace leads to moral looseness, theological liberalism, and a relaxing of the standards that hold everything together. The whole system evolves to keep grace at arm’s length, to hedge it with conditions, to make sure no one takes it too far.

All this produces a faith built mostly on fear and simple answers. This sort of faith is not the reverent, wondering awe that the Bible describes as the beginning of wisdom, but the anxious, performance-driven dread of someone who is never quite sure if they have done enough, or know enough, or have sacrificed enough. When a system like that fails, and it will fail because no human being can sustain it indefinitely, there is not enough of the good of faith to catch you. The relationship was transactional and the transaction ended when one party stopped paying.

The tradition I grew up in handed me a very specific hermeneutic. A hermeneutic is simply a set of lenses through which you read and interpret the world. It was a very particular way of reading Scripture, understanding God, and organizing my spiritual life. I had absorbed it so thoroughly it felt like the only way to believe clearly. The system was so total and the view so expansive that for me it had become faith itself.

But it wasn’t actually faith. It was a system. And when the system broke, I mistook the damage for the loss of everything.

There is also a deeper confusion these systems create about the precise nature of faith itself. In legalistic traditions, faith is reduced to knowledge. The person with “strong faith” is the one who can answer the hard questions, win the theological debate, and explain away the doubts. Certainty is the goal.

But certainty is not faith. When a person knows something (or thinks they do) it is not faith, it is knowledge. Knowledge and faith are connected but are not the same things. In fact, they function in opposite directions. If you already know the answer, you don’t need faith. Faith is the muscle you exercise when you don’t know, when the way forward is uncertain, when the outcome is not in your control. Faith is what you need when all you can do is hope or trust, but you still need to move. Basically, faith is what you need to live life because so much of it is unsure.

If you are a former fundamentalist who lost faith it might be hard for you to hear, but have you considered the possibility that you never knew what faith was in the first place? I ask because that has been my conclusion about my own faith journey. I am not sure I even considered the ancient idea of faith until I was 30 years old. Life is full of questions that cannot be answered and problems that cannot be solved by having information. To live at all is to learn to practice trust. The question is not whether you will have faith in something, the question is whether what you place your trust in will be worthy of it.

When someone begins to dismantle a legalistic faith, there is enormous and understandable relief. After a lifetime of forced certainty and the constant anxiety of performance, being finally allowed to doubt, to question, to reject the controlling answers — that freedom feels like waking up. That season of deconstruction is often necessary and even healthy. Take your time. The damage done by spiritual abuse and shame and exhaustion is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

But there is a gravitational pull in deconstruction that needs to be understood. The relief of tearing things down can become its own certainty, its own tribe, its own identity. Perpetual critique eventually feels like wisdom. And if that happens, deconstruction will end up as rigid and closed as the system it replaced, just with different answers. Radical atheism has the same attraction. Consider the possibility that your legalistic religious tradition trained you to seek “truth” and solid answers and that atheism and deconstruction might be the ultimate obedience to that childhood direction.

Faith — the ancient kind, not the legalistic sort — requires humility. It requires openness. Deconstruction, if it hardens, creates a posture of resistance that is just as allergic to love and grace as the system it left behind.

Jesus told a story that speaks directly to this. You probably know it as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but the younger son who runs away and comes home is only half the story. The other half is the older brother, and he is a good picture of a person formed by legalism.

Consider that the elder brother never left. He obeyed every command. He did everything right. And when the father ran out to embrace the returning wreck of his younger brother, the elder son refused to come inside. He stood in the courtyard, furious. The father’s love and grace toward his brother is not just surprising, it is offensive. It violates the transaction-based system through which he has understood his relationship with his father.

It is heartbreaking when he says, “I have never disobeyed your command, and you never gave me even a young goat that I might celebrate.” He has been in his father’s house his entire life and experienced none of his father’s joy. Was it because he was relating to his father as an employer, not as a son?  Was he meeting a contractual obligation instead of living inside a family?

The younger son, who hit rock bottom, found it easier to come home because he had nothing left to protect. The elder son, standing outside the party in his moral uprightness, is the harder case because his very goodness has become the wall between him and his father. The father pleads with him. The invitation is open. The party is still going. But the older son is stuck.

One of the most disorienting and liberating discoveries I made in the wreckage of my old faith was this: most Christians in the world, across most of Christian history, never read the Bible the way I was taught to read it and their understanding of truth never matched mine. The tradition I grew up in, like most fundamentalist and restorationist movements, carried the implicit claim that it alone had recovered the original truth, and that everyone else had been in error for centuries.

When I finally had enough distance to look at the actual breadth of the Christian tradition like the Church Fathers, the ancient councils, the liturgies and creeds that predated my tradition by more than a thousand years, I realized that my childhood understanding of faith did not have very much in common with it. The thing I grew up with was something new. I had discovered something very, very old. Older than the system I knew that had ironically claimed exclusive access to the original.

That was a profound life-giving gift. The historic Christian faith of the Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Anglican, and others had been holding together mystery and intellect, doubt and devotion, ancient liturgy and honest inquiry, long before my tradition existed. None of these would ever ask me to stop thinking in order to believe. It handed me the creeds and the sacraments and the great sweep of Christian prayer and said to me, “here is ancient faith. Bring your whole self to it.”

For someone whose intellectual life and devotional life had been kept in separate rooms by a system that feared honest questions, that sort of faith felt like coming home. It still does.

If you grew up in a tradition like mine and walked away, I am not trying to talk you back into something that hurt you.

I want to gently suggest the possibility that what you lost and what you were looking for are not the same thing. You may have lost a hermeneutic, a system, an idol that wore God’s face, and mistaken that loss for the loss of God himself.

The God of grace is not the god of any legalistic tradition. He is the father in the story who sees the returning figure from a long way off and runs toward them. You don’t have to have it all figured out to take a step toward that. The party is still going.

See you in church!

Fr. Tom +